I think like all organisations there are brilliant NHS staff and there are poor NHS staff but some things I have observed in the past 12 months due to supporting a friend with cancer:
1. Nurses (many after doing a 4 year degree) can't prescribe so much as a paracetamol or put a dehydrated patient on an IV drip without sign off by a Doctor. This leads to long wait times for decisions from overworked Doctors. Well trained but junior staff should have more authority/empowerment. In my friend's case (a 50yr old woman with stage IV breast cancer being treated for a broken hip) the symptoms were - weakness, extremely low blood pressure (90/60), urine the colour of malt whisky in her bag and vomiting. I (with no medical training) repeatedly kept telling the nurses she was dehydrated and needed IV fluids). They (with 4 years medical training and years of experience on the wards) ignored me and said any decisions like that would be taken by the Doctor. In the meantime they kept trying to get my friend out of bed to walk around on her hip repair when she was too weak to stand! It took 2 days until she was seen by a Doctor who (yes you guessed it!!) prescribed an IV drip - my friend then recovered rapidly!
2. Desperately needed multi million pound cancer beam therapy machines like Cyberknife (of which I believe there are only 3 in the country - Bristol, London and I think Leeds) only operate between 9-5 MOn-Fri. meanwhile people wait too long for treatment with them... Now I work in the airlines and I can tell you that their multi million pound airline training simulators are in use literally 24 hours a day. Walk into the sim hall at 3am in the morning and those machines are in use - because companies don't like multi million pound machines lying around doing nothing!!
3. My local Doctors surgery were unable to send me a copy of my referral letter to a specialist by email and I had to drive in to collect a paper copy because they are "only allowed to email other NHS email addresses and nobody outside the NHS for security reasons". Now I ask you - in an age where companies conduct multi million pound trade deals over email and have been doing for probably 2 decades at least when is the NHS going to get with the program and develop working business processes that leverage the benefit of technology????
4. Oh and why is it that staff in the airlines fly 24/7, 7 days a week and yet Sat and Sunday there's barely a GP in the nation working, there's only a skeleton staff in hospitals and at night hospitals run on a bare minimum staff? People get sick or have accidents day and night 7 days a week and so I see no reason why the hospitals, Doctors surgeries, nurses and Doctors aren't working around the clock like airline crew (and many other businesses) do.
I'm the first to acknowledge that the Tories have royally ballsed up the system by underfunding it (below inflation) for the past 12 years. They have caused the Brexit shitstorm which has reduced the supply of skilled European Doctors and nurses who work here, they have cut funding at universities for training Doctors and nurses which means less have been trained and all of this has led to an over-reliance on (expensive) bank and agency staff. Labour funded the NHS at above inflation as a matter of policy and things got a lot better under them.
It's not just the NHS it's the entire fabric of Britain that is failing under the 'small state' mentality of the Conservatives. Never in living memory have the roads, transport, hospitals, ambulances, universities and other critical national infrastructure been in such a shocking state. I for one am sick and tired of them looking after the non-dom's, the offshore tax haven users and the large transnationals booking very little tax through the UK exchequer. I have a multi millionaire Brother in Law who would never have to pay a marginal rate of tax above 20% anyway (because he runs his own company and pays himself dividends attracting corporation tax at 20% ish) who now uses an offshore wealth management company in Jersey to reduce his tax liabilities further. God knows what percentage of his actual earnings he pays in tax but it must be the square root of bugger all.... Meanwhile muggins here earning about £55 000 with an airline has a marginal tax rate of 40% plus about 9% NI on every penny I earn above about £40k and nobody gives me a tax deductible on my car needed to get to work or my petrol expenses... In fact the inland revenue recently came after airline crews for taxation on their overseas allowances which are paid to enable us to eat or get a coffee or whatever in the Hilton in Berlin etc which as you can imagine isn't cheap but is totally necessary. Judging by Question Time last night I am not alone. The Conservatives are finished at the next election because they have become the party who look after the top 5% like my Brother in law and screw the other 95% - including both the middle classes (like me) and the working classes and poor. If Starmer decides to bring in proportional representation then the Tories will be finished for good and never again will this nation be led by a party of such incredibly narrow appeal. Last time they were elected into Government on a mere 43.6% of the vote with a massive majority and 365 seats due to the way the current boundaries and first past the post loads things in their favour. The Lib dems as an example won 11% of the vote (a quarter as many votes as the Tories) and got just 11 seats - it's not democracy, it's ridiculous!
