{"id":4555,"date":"2022-10-26T14:08:32","date_gmt":"2022-10-26T13:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/?p=4555"},"modified":"2022-10-30T20:07:38","modified_gmt":"2022-10-30T20:07:38","slug":"on-the-nhs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/?p=4555","title":{"rendered":"On the NHS"},"content":{"rendered":"

So here is where I must tread carefully and try to be sensible and objective. While I’m perfectly happy giving the Royals a kicking<\/a>, and positively aching to tear into MPs<\/a>, there are some things that you have to approach with care, and the NHS is one of them. <\/p>\n

There’s one issue that is tricky, of course. We spent the pandemic lionising the NHS, setting them out as heroes. Now, NHS staff are, mostly, brilliant, hard-working, dedicated people that we should all recognise and reward properly for their effort, but the hero-worship, clapping, and *rolls eyes* saucepan banging is counter productive and distracts from the issue that we should actually support and most of all pay them, for fucks sake. They’re professionals doing a job, not volunteers. Pay Them. As it was said at the time, clapping doesn’t pay for groceries.<\/p>\n

So then: the NHS. Where do we start?<\/p>\n

Well, I probably wouldn’t be here without it, for a start, as wouldn’t several friends and family. For the moment, at least, we still have an NHS that is mostly free at the point of use, so that if you need treatment, for the most part, you don’t have to hand over a credit card. Our politicians might not like it that way, but, for the moment at least, that is how it is.<\/p>\n

I’ll continue with my recent operation<\/a>. A long, complex operation, with a bit more aftercare than expected, and the care was nothing less than superb. I was in the same room, in the same unit, as back in 2015, and everything ran really well. Staff were busy, but nothing failed,everything worked. The only noticeable change was getting only one physio rather than 2. So here delivering excellent care, and improving my life with an operation that would be hugely expensive- probably prohibitively so- in private healthcare.<\/p>\n

I’ll move on to my soon to be ex and not to be named GP practice that couldn’t meet a basic need (removal of staples, 7 days later) because they had no appointments available for a time-critical procedure, which to me looks to be a basic failure of managing and scheduling. This isn’t an unexpected thing, nor one that falls outside the remit of the practice.<\/p>\n

on to the A&E department locally where the staff were literally on the edge of tears, people waited for hours and hours for simple tests and patients kept coming because the primary care functions that should be handled outside A&E aren’t and the resources have been cut to the bone.<\/p>\n

The causes? Complex. There’s the Brexit disaster, of course: the NHS for years has been dependent on EU-sourced labour, and in my time in the QE I met a few of the ones who didn’t take our invitation to fuck off back home, but the case is the pool of available nursing staff has reduced, so nursing hours are tighter than ever, and there’s no easy way out. Notably, at the QE, many nursing staff seemed to be non-EU27 immigrants- evidence that we simply don’t have any way to provide sufficient staff except through immigration, but that’s no surprise and immigration shouldn’t be an issue in a country where we are all of immigrant stock of one form or another.<\/p>\n

Then there’s always the drastic under-funding: chatting with nursing staff, the unit I was in suffered from the strain on hospital bed spaces, often having to take patients from elsewhere when those spaces should have been available for surgeries like mine: when I arrived on the Monday morning, I was waiting for someone to leave. The unit itself was in the “heritage” building of the QE, which had supposedly been superseded by the new building, but then got re-opened. Trips to imaging for an X-ray meant being wheeled a long way over a link bridge. As the new building is now over a decade old, evidently something didn’t go to plan?<\/p>\n

The NHS is one of the very few things left that we should be proud of in the UK: while we’re a laughing stock politically and economically, our healthcare system still tries to care for us well, and is mostly staffed by dedicated professionals that we don’t recognise well enough, and we allow politicians with ulterior motives to damage it at every turn, and we sometimes accept poor service because that is just the way it is. That shouldn’t be the way it is, and while our economy is much weaker than it was following Brexit<\/a>, the sheer incompetence of politicians influenced by 55 Tufton St<\/a>, and other world events, we can afford this: it is a matter of choice, and it is about time we woke up to that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So here is where I must tread carefully and try to be sensible and objective. While I’m perfectly happy giving the Royals a kicking, and positively aching to tear into MPs, there are some things that you have to approach with care, and the NHS is one of them. There’s one issue that is tricky, … Continue reading On the NHS<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}