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[Auctopus]

So, the Red bloody Cross who are already saving and aiding lives in Syria and Yemen and have been deployed on our own shores to save a crumbling NHS.

BBC

The charity said volunteers and staff had been helping patients get home from hospital and called for more government money to stabilise the situation.
It comes as a third of hospital trusts in England warned they needed action to cope with patient numbers last month.
NHS England said plans were in place to deal with winter pressure and beds were not as full as this time last year.

British Red Cross provided support to staff at the East Midlands Ambulance Service across Nottingham, Leicester, Lincoln, Kettering and Northampton on 1 January.
It also boosted existing services offering support at home to help alleviate pressure on hospitals.
Chief executive Mike Adamson said: "The British Red Cross is on the front line, responding to the humanitarian crisis in our hospital and ambulance services across the country.
"We have been called in to support the NHS and help get people home from hospital and free up much needed beds.

The Guardian

The deaths prompted claims that the health service was “broken”, and long waits for care, chronic bed shortages and staff shortages were leading towards what the head of Britain’s A&E doctors called “untold patient misery”.

Mike Adamson, chief executive of the British Red Cross, said his organisation was “on the front line”. He said: [We are] responding to the humanitarian crisis in our hospital and ambulance services across the country. We have been called in to support the NHS and help get people home from hospital and free up much needed beds. This means deploying our team of emergency volunteers and even calling on our partner Land Rover to lend vehicles to transport patients and get the system moving.”

Dr Mark Holland, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said: “For a long time we have been saying that the NHS is on the edge. But people dying after long spells in hospital corridors shows that the NHS is now broken.

“We have got to the point where the efforts of staff to prop up the system are no longer enough to keep the system afloat. We are asking NHS staff to provide a world-class service, but with third world levels of staffing and third world levels of beds.

The Telegraph

Now a leaked memo to hospital managers - sent by senior officials from NHS England - reveals a desperate attempt to play down the scale of the crisis.

The email, received by NHS directors and and communications staff, instructs hospitals of lines to take if questioned about the level of pressures on them - and sets out an identical statement for every hospital to use.

OP's Opinion: I didn't want to link The Telegraph at first. The spin that paper puts on the story compared to other news outlets is aimed to target staff at the NHS of trying to 'hide' or 'play down' the crisis. Everybody knows it's happening, it's just some people are trying to stay calm and deal with it. The paper is clearly shifting the blame away from the health secretary to doctors and nurses working their lives away.

For Americans reading, the NHS is a jewel of the nation and from the several times I've been treated by them in my life (including a life threatening situation when I was 4 years old, they have been nothing but calm, loving and professional.

This is the result of austeric measures that have been constantly de-funding the NHS. I think we'll be saying goodbye to the NHS we know and love within the next 5 years.

 

[jerry113]

how did it come to this?

 

[Lightning Count]

I am so glad the NHS is a devolved thing in Scotland after seeing how things are going in Englad.

 

[Acorn]

how did it come to this?

Tories

I am so glad the NHS is a devolved thing in Scotland after seeing how things are going in Englad.

Me too.

 

[Moosichu]

That NHS is already dead. Seriously, health professionals have been absolutely fucked over by the government, yet the population just wants less immigrants (Which the NHS depends on). PFIs have wasted so much money, and the private healthcare industry is now making so much money on the government's dime, siphoning-off money for shareholders.

Make no mistake, this is all deliberate.


Edit: Starve the beast

 

[JoeInky]

how did it come to this?

Constant funding cuts so that the government can eventually say "see? Free healthcare doesn't work, it's time to privatise"

 

[Wvrs]

It makes me sick: the NHS has been a bastion of British society since World War II, one of the cornerstones that contributed to us being one of the most progressive and socially liberal countries in the world. I know some Americans can have a difficult time understanding it, but free healthcare for everyone has been one of our core values as a nation for over seventy years.

I suppose it's inevitable that, as the rest of those values crumble around us, so would the NHS. I really hope this crisis is assuaged, but it's more likely we'll see it privatised over the next few years. Sad.

 

[Tacitus_]

Buckle up, it's going to get worse

 

[Moosichu]

Buckle up, it's going to get worse

Yeah, but now it's going to get £350m a week!

 

[Pizza con salsiccia]

So, the Red bloody Cross who are already saving and aiding lives in Syria and Yemen and have been deployed on our own shores to save a crumbling NHS.

.

Red Crescent in Syria and Yemen (although they are under the same umbrella).

ICRC is actually doing a fantastic job around the Lake Chad Basin.
But no one cares about that.

Funny to see the words "humanitarian crisis" mentioned in a first-world country. Doesn't happen often (Katrina, and then? Not even Fukushima I think).

 

[Auctopus]

Buckle up, it's going to get worse

Sadly, this image is only effective with people who already know the truth.

People will just block their eyes and close their eyes when someone shows them this. Not to mention that Universities have now been affected by Brexit with super low International student numbers which will mean a drop in healthcare professionals (I work at a University and the ratio of international students who go in to saving British lives is staggering) which is just plain trouble for everyone.

 

[sohois]

Every time we have these threads people rush to blame austerity, despite the fact that health spending was one of the only areas ring fenced from cuts for many years. The simple fact of the matter is that the NHs was always going to hit a crisis due to demographics.

More and more people are living longer and getting sicker. The NHS would need colossal spending increases just to maintain levels of service, and ultimately no one is going to.vote for those kind of tax increases.

Also, let's not pretend that NHS has ever been some world class service. Britain is rightfully prpoud of the ideal, and certainly its vastly superior to what the US has, but compared to France or Japan its long been sub standard.

 

[Mung]

The situation in hospital emergency departments and primary care is truly disastrous right now. The past two weeks have been the worst I can remember. It's unsafe.

We have decades of deliberate government neglect to thank for this. They want to run the NHS down to the point where privatisation is the only option. We have far fewer beds than in the 80s, but much more demand. The answer is more staff, hospitals and beds, not less.

And I would add that the only reason that the NHS is 'surviving' at all is because of how dedicated the staff are. 12 hour shifts without any breaks for food and drink are becoming the norm. All because the staff are dedicated to patients and to do what they can to keep things afloat.

BTW Boris and Farage you shits, I am waiting for that extra £350 million per week you promised. Oh wait, it never existed.

 

[Real Hero]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp5_Ul-qG0w

 

[Miles Quaritch]

how did it come to this?

These were posted not to long ago....

All going according to plan. In the current climate, I doubt people would even care if the NHS was dismantled. They'd believe there was something better on the horizon...what that might be? We'll just have to wait and see.

 

[Little Old Man]

Every time we have these threads people rush to blame austerity, despite the fact that health spending was one of the only areas ring fenced from cuts for many years. The simple fact of the matter is that the NHs was always going to hit a crisis due to demographics.

More and more people are living longer and getting sicker. The NHS would need colossal spending increases just to maintain levels of service, and ultimately no one is going to.vote for those kind of tax increases.

Also, let's not pretend that NHS has ever been some world class service. Britain is rightfully prpoud of the ideal, and certainly its vastly superior to what the US has, but compared to France or Japan its long been sub standard.

The budget was ring fenced in terms of financial sum in real terms, but there have been no increases to factor in a growing population, and no increases to reflect that we have an aging one. Further, the ring fence only protected front line services. Walk in centres, social services, funding to vulnerable groups have all been cut, which feeds through to more demand at A&E, for consultants, etc etc.

As far as many voters are aware, the tag line of 'nhs spending is perfected under the Tories', is a very different situation to the actual reality. And rather foolishly, many voters didn't read up on it prior to voting. Or when it came to austerity, they didn't think through the long term ramifications, very much a 'fuck you, not my problem, it won't impact me' kind of thinking.


Though i do agree that on various measures we can lag behind other nations health care systems. The speed at which France hospitals work through suspected cases of cancer is incredible.

 

[Jackpot]

Tories

Actually New Labour's PFIs preceded that. Ridiculous contracts that locked hospitals into a single supplier with no other option.

If you ever wondered what was the cause behind "Hospital pays company £2000 to change lightbulb!" stories were, it's PFIs.

 

[Chinner]

This is the plan. Destroy its credibility and reputation and fully privatise the industry.

Better get your health insurance, and hope you don't have a pre existing health condition, cause Theresa May and cronies are going to fuck you hard.

 

[daviyoung]

I hear a story like this every winter

 

[Mung]

I hear a story like this every winter

Yes, and it's always true, and it's now worsened to the point that it's actually collapsing.

 

[DeathyBoy]

That NHS is already dead. Seriously, health professionals have been absolutely fucked over by the government, yet the population just wants less immigrants (Which the NHS depends on). PFIs have wasted so much money, and the private healthcare industry is now making so much money on the government's dime, siphoning-off money for shareholders.

Make no mistake, this is all deliberate.


Edit: Starve the beast

I work in the NHS and...

What I can say is that it's a place full of people on the shop floor working with the very best of intentions in an incredibly stressful job that few people, patients or government or other people, particularly understands. There is no win, there's invariably just degrees of losing. Whenever shit hits the fan, we just get on with it.

More money? Absolutely. A less terrible government? Absolutely. Better everything? Yes.

Until that day comes, we'll just go day by day as the equivalent of the damn ship from Firefly.

 

[sohois]

The budget was ring fenced in terms of financial sum in real terms, but there have been no increases to factor in a growing population, and no increases to reflect that we have an aging one. Further, the ring fence only protected front line services. Walk in centres, social services, funding to vulnerable groups have all been cut, which feeds through to more demand at A&E, for consultants, etc etc.

As far as many voters are aware, the tag line of 'nhs spending is perfected under the Tories', is a very different situation to the actual reality. And rather foolishly, many voters didn't read up on it prior to voting. Or when it came to austerity, they didn't think through the long term ramifications, very much a 'fuck you, not my problem, it won't impact me' kind of thinking.


Though i do agree that on various measures we can lag behind other nations health care systems. The speed at which France hospitals work through suspected cases of cancer is incredible.

Well yeah, that's kind of what I meant when I mentioned demographics. The spending increases needed to meet the growth in demand would simply have been unpalatable. Even assuming there was no austerity, at a time of very sluggish growth in the economy the NHS would have had to eat in other department's budgets just to stay in the same place.

 

[PepsimanVsJoe]

These were posted not to long ago....

Good lord, that's blatant sabotage.

 

[Maledict]

I am so glad the NHS is a devolved thing in Scotland after seeing how things are going in Englad.

Um, the NHS in Scotland has been cut by the SNP. The tories didn't cut the NHS in England, they just didn't fund it enough to match the growing and aging population. In Scotland the SNP actually cut the NHS funding.

Not to defend the tories, but it's amazing what people will instinctively believe.

 

[Engell]

obligatory....

 

[Dynasty]

 

[CSJ]

Over christmas periods our hospital was down to 5 free beds.
That's worryingly low, and there's only 1 hospital here :C

 

[hohoXD123]

What did people think would happen when you underfund a service, waste billions through unnecessary and harmful reorganisation, demoralise a work force which is already flocking abroad, all while there are greater demands being put on the service by an ageing population and an underfunded social care/mental health service. We have been warned about a winter crisis for years now, and this year we had several patients dying in Worcestershire Royal hospital purely because of a lack of resources, one of whom was a heart attack patient who was left on a trolley for 36 hours for crying out loud. Things don't exactly look to improve either, the fact that Jeremy Hunt is still Health Secretary after forcing doctors to strike for the first time in decades should give you an idea of roughly how many shits the Conservatives give. Before you know it we'll have MSF helping out in UK hospitals.

 

[Lagamorph]

Um, the NHS in Scotland has been cut by the SNP. The tories didn't cut the NHS in England, they just didn't fund it enough to match the growing and aging population. In Scotland the SNP actually cut the NHS funding.

Not to defend the tories, but it's amazing what people will instinctively believe.

True. The difference is that population growth in England is higher than in Scotland so the effects are just felt more. Pretending the SNP are some kind of saviours of the NHS is just completely wrong.

Also, the Red Cross aiding the NHS is nothing new. They've helped with patient transport for decades now.

 

[jelly]

NHS Scotland isn't that great either. They cut back pretty deep, lack of nurses, people having to work overtime without pay, closing wards because of it. Sturgeon can say she has invested in training nurses but she gutted them before that. Also that Death Star hospital in Glasgow which was built but closes other hospitals so you have to travel to one location instead of what we had previously in different parts of the City which sucks for a lot of people. Also, there is practically no parking at this super hospital, they didn't think that through and it's next to sewage works I think or is it a dump so you can't open the windows for some fresh air.

 

[AHA-Lambda]

how did it come to this?

Tory scum basically

 

[Lkr]

Sorry to see this happen to you Englandgaf
Anyone in the government or media telling you the American system is any better is yanking your chain.
I saw a new psychiatrist in the USA back in April 2014. I had some lab work done and I only just got my diagnosis this past November of a disease that was noticed by my psychiatrist in this April 2014 blood work. It took having to see three other doctors and dealing with that scheduling as well.
I see a common excuse/talking point for those fooled into being against a single payer system is to claim that in Canada it takes years to see someone. Well even if that's true, it works the same exact fucking way here, except I still have expensive medical expenses even with insurance.

All of this is easily fixed by increasing the hospital budgets for y'all.

 

[Zutroy]

Every time we have these threads people rush to blame austerity, despite the fact that health spending was one of the only areas ring fenced from cuts for many years. The simple fact of the matter is that the NHs was always going to hit a crisis due to demographics.

More and more people are living longer and getting sicker. The NHS would need colossal spending increases just to maintain levels of service, and ultimately no one is going to.vote for those kind of tax increases.

Also, let's not pretend that NHS has ever been some world class service. Britain is rightfully prpoud of the ideal, and certainly its vastly superior to what the US has, but compared to France or Japan its long been sub standard.

I only have an old source for this, but only three years ago the NHS was ranked the number one in the world AND was the cheapest in terms of tax per person.

I don't think the service will have moved much down the rankings in just three years, but if they have the Tories are purely to blame.

I'm also fairly certain an increase in tax if it was described purely as for the NHS is the one tax the British people would be willing to accept.

 

[Linkstrikesback]

how did it come to this?

The country voted in a bunch of rich polticians whose official stance would be to put all the plebs in gas chambers if they could.

As it is, they have to settle for a slower approach.

 

[Bleepey]

The country voted in a bunch of rich polticians whose official stance would be to put all the plebs in gas chambers if they could.

As it is, they have to settle for a slower approach.

A lot of leave campaigners are very anti nhs. The moment I saw the Nhs bus thing that was like the moment I knew the Brexit campaign went from kinda bullshit to total bullshit.

 

[Maledict]

NHS Scotland isn't that great either. They cut back pretty deep, lack of nurses, people having to work overtime without pay, closing wards because of it. Sturgeon can say she has invested in training nurses but she gutted them before that. Also that Death Star hospital in Glasgow which was built but closes other hospitals so you have to travel to one location instead of what we had previously in different parts of the City which sucks for a lot of people. Also, there is practically no parking at this super hospital, they didn't think that through and it's next to sewage works I think or is it a dump so you can't open the windows for some fresh air.

To be fair, replacing many small hospitals with one large hospital is actually an evidence backed choice that helps save lives. Parking issues aside, it's been shown repeatedly that you get better treatment at the large hospitals with specialist units than you do multiple smaller hospitals spread out over a larger distance. The extra time taken for ambulances to get to the single hospital doesn't actually make much difference (and is easily outweighed by the decreases in surgery deaths etc).

Unfortunately, shutting hospitals is political suicide, so even when it's the right thing to it's really really hard because people are so attached to them and think it matters - even though the way hospitals work and the way we provide healthcare has changed so massively since they were first built.

The parking issue is of course, fucking moronic and no excuses there.

 

[AHA-Lambda]

A lot of leave campaigners are very anti nhs. The moment I saw the Nhs bus thing that was like the moment I knew the Brexit campaign went from kinda bullshit to total bullshit.

Pretty much, it was incredibly transparent, and yet people still bloody believed it

 

[deadlast]

Pretty much, it was incredibly transparent, and yet people still bloody believed it

People don't want truth, they just want a nice story.

 

[Screaming Meat]

This is fucked. Tories have been aching to sell off the rest of the NHS since forever.

 

[Lagamorph]

Why are people insisting the Tories are so anti-NHS? Since coming to power the Tories have never cut NHS funding have they? They've increased it since coming to power in 2010 by billions of pounds, it's just not by enough. They've explicitly excluded the NHS from cuts/austerity measures.
Yet the SNP, who do cut NHS funding, get hailed as some kind of saviours of the people?

 

[Miles Quaritch]

Why are people insisting the Tories are so anti-NHS? Since coming to power the Tories have never cut NHS funding have they? They've increased it since coming to power in 2010 by billions of pounds, it's just not by enough. They've explicitly excluded the NHS from cuts/austerity measures.
Yet the SNP, who do cut NHS funding, get hailed as some kind of saviours of the people?

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-budget

The budget for the NHS in England for 2015/16 is £116.4 billion.

The increase in spending announced in the 2015 Spending Review will see the NHS budget increase to £133.1 billion by 2020/21. This amounts to a real increase of £4.5 billion. Nearly half this amount is earmarked for 2016/17, leaving the remaining increase spread over the next four years.

This means that between 2009/10 and 2020/21, spending on the NHS in England will rise by nearly £35 billion in cash terms – an increase of 35 per cent. But much of this increase will be swallowed up by rising prices. In fact, around £24 billion will be absorbed by inflation, leaving a real increase of just £11 billion (a 10 per cent rise over eleven years; equivalent to an average annual increase of just 0.9 per cent).

Purposefully underfunded or wilfully ignorant of realities?

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Why are people insisting the Tories are so anti-NHS?

Come on, Tories are pro NHS in the same way they were pro Europe. Not one of them is going to shed a tear on the day that their PM steps up to the box and announces that the only way to save the NHS is to privatise it.

 

[Maledict]

Purposefully underfunded or wilfully ignorant of realities?

I'm sorry but there is a light year of difference between "Cut the NHS" and "Didn't increase the amount of cash it gets enough". And I do think it incredibly hypocritical of people to attack the Tories for England NHS, and yet the SNPs *actual* cuts of NHS funding gets ignored. And I am hardly a right wing poster!

This is one of the reasons labour is in such straights. It keeps campaigning on the NHS, but the evidence simply isn't there to persuade the voting public. The Tories have done enough to inoculate themselves against "Save the NHS" campaigns, and the arguments become way too technical for most people. Not increasing NHS funding enough due to the rising age of the population is not a soundbite nor a good campaign position.

I'm absolutely sure many in the conservative party would want to privatise the NHS. But I don't think it's a good campaign point, nor do I think the evidence is there to say they are doing that. It was Labour that increased the % of private work in the NHS the most after all, and it was Brown's bloody stupid PFI contracts that caused a big part of this problem.

 

[system11]

Labour AND Tories.

Tony Blair's PFIs was an absolute disgrace.

Get with the program, everything Labour does is good, and everything the Conservatives do is bad. There's no halfway or actual reality, only pre-disposed hyperbole.

I'm waiting for the first person to explain the major cause of this so I can watch them get dogpiled.

 

[milanbaros]

Gordon Brown significantly increased the budget when he was Chancellor. Those increases were unsustainable though.

If people want a better NHS it will require higher taxes. If people are ok with this then it can be saved.

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

What is the age of retirement in the UK? How has it changed over the past 10-20 years?

 

[jelly]

More money is needed for the NHS but they don't run them well to begin with, any more money will go down the drain. It needs a drastic rethink, they need to stop the exploitation of the NHS by private companies and change it to private companies serving them on fair terms. The NHS is massive enough to throw it's weight around but the government has basically chopped it into little pieces that get bullied into submission and taken for a ride. Staffing needs to be kicked back a few decades instead of consultants messing it up. It doesn't work well enough. If the government can reform without gutting it then put money into it, I'm all for it but the former will never happen.

 

[Lagamorph]

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-budget

Purposefully underfunded or wilfully ignorant of realities?

If the Tories wanted to purposefully underfund the NHS then they'd follow the example of Scotland and cut funding, not increase it. Even if part of the increases are absorbed by inflation, funding has still increased, that's an undeniable fact.
The way people talk though it's as if they think the reverse is true, that the evil Tories are cutting NHS funding and the saviour SNP are increasing funding.

 

[Juicy Bob]

I've been an NHS worker (non-clinical) for about four months. All I can say is that it's an absolute privilege to work for such an organisation and I'm very proud to be a part of it and contribute in some small way.

 

[Goodlife]

Those increases were unsustainable though.

Honest to god