The NHS can fairly be described as ‘good in parts’, it’s the ultimate organisational Curate’s Egg, Some bits of it and some of its staff are excellent and praiseworthy, whilst other parts of the NHS and its staff are truly awful.
Those of us who use the NHS or who have friends and relatives who do so have the misfortune to have to encounter bad organisation, long waits for treatment, badly deployed staff and other resources, customer service that is so bad that it would embarrass a Soviet shopworker and waste, lots and lots of waste. As for staff there’s obviously some brilliant ones, like my specialist diabetes nurse, but there are also staff who are obviously in healthcare for the money and are too often bereft of any caring attitudes to their customers.
The public as is often the case with nationalised industries such as the National Health Service often get poor service from them. You don’t have to look hard either on here or elsewhere to find horror stories about poor treatment from the NHS. You might even talk to someone who has had to use NHS maternity facilities which one report from the Care Quality Commission contained the worrying information that about 60% of NHS maternity facilities were ‘not safe’. The vast majority of people I encounter have got their own NHS horror story, it might be a minor one about an inconvenience or it might be something that had life changing or life threatening results.
But it’s not just us ‘civilians’ that get less than adequate treatment from the NHS. The NHS, apparently according to one claim I’ve seen, treats its retired medical staff just as shit as it treats the rest of us.
The screen shot below was being punted around by a supporter of the NHS who believes that the problem outlined below was caused by a ‘lack of funding’ for the NHS. However some of don’t believe that. This cock up is clearly down to appallingly bad management. Why, for example, isn’t money being diverted from less clinically important things towards keeping operating theatres and diagnostic suites open 24/7? Why are doctors having to make ‘battlefield type’ triage decisions on who to treat next and thereby choosing the patient who is young and with children. The reason for both of these situations is bad management.
If this is an accurate example of how the NHS treats those who once worked for the NHS, are cooperative with staff and knowledgable about their medical condition, then just how badly are the NHS treating the rest of us? Britons deserve better for our horrendous taxation levels than that what the NHS gives us. I believe that there should be universal healthcare for a nation’s citizens (and only for that nations citizens) but such a system would need to be safer, more responsive to the needs of the ultimate customer and far far better managed and make better use of resources than the NHS does.