The report was the result of a nine-week review by the independent peer and NHS surgeon Lord Darzi. He was asked by Labour, shortly after the election, to identify the failings in the health service, but his remit did not stretch to coming up with solutions.
His findings present a stark picture of a service which he says is in “serious trouble” with declining productivity, “ballooning” waits and “awful” emergency services that put patients at risk.
From the report: In 2010, 94 per cent of people attending a type 1 or type 2 A&E were seen within four hours; by May 2024 that figure had dropped to just over 60 per cent (and for all three types of A&E combined, performance is now at 74 per cent). More than 100,000 infants waited more than 6 hours last year and nearly 10 per cent of all patients are now waiting for 12 hours or more.
According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, these long waits are likely to be causing an additional 14,000 more deaths a year—more than double all British armed forces’ combat deaths since the health service was founded in 1948.
Especially when successive governments have made a concerted effort to ensure that’s the case.
Mind you, I always wonder what folk can be thinking when they make this claim whilst residing in a country that provides its citizenry with an iteration of socialist medicine. Or Medicare beneficiaries, come to that.
What were those problems, specifically? Was this outfit attempting to provide specialty sports medicine services within an NHS contract…or totally independent?
Seems to me that this would be a set up catering to a niche market…largely healthy individuals looking for something akin to a concierge practice. Most folk of my acquaintance who’ve set up such operations…both in the UK and here in the US… are generally marketing their services to the self pay “customer” rather than contracting with third party payers.
Mitt Romney-style, Private Equity health care is the model for the future?
I saw part of the Senate hearing into Stewart Health Care last night. Stewart stopped paying vendors and they were missing many items like a “Bereavement Box” for a child that was still-born. Instead nurses were forced to present the remains to the grieving couple in an old FedEx box.
If you want an excuse to make a major change in something, like privatizing a national health service, first, you need to set it up to fail. If you lived in Michigan for the last couple dozen years, you would observe that government was incapable of maintaining roads, when the truth was Lansing was funding road maintenance at half the per-capita rate of the surrounding states.
So how did one end up with a better functioning (French) system rather than a poorly functioning (British) system? What are the differences and how did they arise?
Aah, there’s the problem. Wrong business model. The NHS isn’t particularly well designed to allow for enterprising individuals to cherry pick what here in the US would be the lucrative cases, and restrict their practices to, say, torn ACLs etc. Primarily a matter of funding and utilising resources. As you might’ve inferred from reading Lord Darzi’s report…you did read the actual report, right?..specialty services are set up to operate within the hospital system which, for someone who hasn’t yet made their name in the field they wish to work in, is how they would start. Which hospital were you working with? That isolated incident might be what has coloured the opinion you form on such a brief and limited acquaintance.
You’ll have read in the report and any subsequent analysis that there is the suggestion that more emphasis needs to be concentrated on primary care/community services…presumably at the expense of specialty care. For sure general practice is hopelessly underfunded and overwhelmed but, fewer specialty services (also under pressure) doesn’t strike me as the way to go. Mind you, I would say that now, wouldn’t I, given my example of supervised neglect at primary care level. Maybe others in a similar boat might agree.
We were listening to a BEEB interview Friday morning with a couple of folk with a pretty decent take, i.e. something we’ve always said about the NHS…based on our own experiences and subsequent observations (an important caveat there!) I couldn’t find it on short notice but here’s an example of one big issue that was raised by Prof Leary in the interview (and with some of her input here
A heck of a lot of similarities to utilisation of funds here in the US
PS…you’ll need to read or scroll down to the section on experience levels in NHS staff. This has been especially noticeable during Covid. Prior to that, there (UK) as here (my household for but one) saw senior consultants (attendings) working past their sell by date…and oftentimes because there was no one to fill the positions. I think it might’ve been a little earlier in coming here but the idea of “travel nurses/doctors” …folk working on short term locum contracts…has become quite the thing over the past decade. Possibly longer but we’re coming up to the time we moved to Colorado and my husband finished his last gig in an academic set up (Harvard) and began his gig in a for profit environment (Centura group). So “our” generation of staff are now vacating positions that can require more than one individual to fill…possibly because, much like the rest of the population, folk have discovered there’s more to life than grinding away for a paycheck so are demanding much shorter hours for the same/higher paycheck.
There is no such thing as “health” insurance. You cannot prevent people from losing their health. The only kind of insurance that exists is “wealth” insurance. You can insure that people can afford to pay their medical bills, or repair their home after a fire, or replace a sunken ship. The definition of insurance is transferring a risk that you cannot bear to a party that can, i.e. an insurance company. Insurance is only about money.
Depends on who pays, if citizens pay individually, no. If government pays, yes. And you can have a mixed bag created by laws that restrict what insurance companies can refuse to cover.
There is an additional issue. There are routine health related activities that should be covered by one’s ordinary budget. When you shift these to insurance you are exceeding the purpose of insurance, risk transfer, creating a new model, prepaid healthcare, with the insurance company getting a cut that it would not be getting with proper risk transfer, the raison d’etre of insurance.
Most countries in Europe are able to provide basic health care for everyone. We should be able to do something similar to the two tier plan in Germany.
Does not have to cover Cadilac treatments but needs to cover the basics.
This is clearly incorrect. Human remains are not permitted to be given to anyone without a license to handle human remains. Those licensed include mortuaries and other types of funeral service providers (cremation, etc). In all other cases, human remains are disposed of by cremation as “red bag” waste.
(Many years ago, a distant relative died and had no children, so we had to arrange for the transfer of the body to another country where it was to be buried according to their LWAT. What a pain in the azz that was, needed to get a funeral home involved ($$) to transfer the body legally to the airport, then some other outfit at the airport ($$) to handle the transfer to the plane, then yet another group on the other side ($$), and then finally the actually funeral home over there.)
I don’t think they let the grieving parents take the FedEx box home. They’re just presenting the remains to the parents for a sense of closure if they think that helps, and let them hold it for a while, pray on it, etc…
