The Chairman Mao resembling, Monarchy hating, threat to Britain, Labour Party thread

[Demitri_C]

4 hours ago, limpid said:

But that means only one of the things has happened.

Not really if you follow a plan that i suggested. Take it in two steps. Plough the money in once you stop the waste.

Another is stop **** wasting money on agency staff especially in admin. You may have to with nursing but admin if the wages were more and conditions better you could attract people to it.

Also allow more flexible working and stop wasting money renting office space 

[limpid]

12 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

Not really if you follow a plan that i suggested. Take it in two steps. Plough the money in once you stop the waste.

Another is stop **** wasting money on agency staff especially in admin. You may have to with nursing but admin if the wages were more and conditions better you could attract people to it.

Also allow more flexible working and stop wasting money renting office space 

The two things were increasing the tax (from NI) and making things more efficient. Those can both happen at the same time. The money can go into a pot for later use if necessary. Or it could be used to start putting new (efficient) systems in place around recruitment / training.

[one_ian_taylor]

8 hours ago, Demitri_C said:

Its abit yes and no. We alluded to same point about staffing - there is shortage of nurses and doctors so you cant do new hospitals without them. Therefore doing the pay increase will certainly help in that area.

But in my local area where we cant get appointments started when they closed two hospitals and some gps (or merged them) as that added pressure to the ones that were left.  Not a fan of scrapping building new hospitals.

 

Not sure anyone is, but as has been well documented, the new hospitals weren't new hospitals. I suspect it's  a painful political decision,  as the next thing from the Tories will be "you cancelled all the new hospitals we promised". Making the point that the projects weren't  new hospitals isn't  as headline grabby. 

[Demitri_C]

1 hour ago, limpid said:

The two things were increasing the tax (from NI) and making things more efficient. Those can both happen at the same time. The money can go into a pot for later use if necessary. Or it could be used to start putting new (efficient) systems in place around recruitment / training.

But the first option has been done for how many years and no improvement.  Yes you could argue it was the previous government but wheres all the previous money gone? Surely best way is identifying areas of waste, calculating how much that saves you then top it up? As opposed to throwing  a random number like 9 billion towards it with no plan where its going?

I really do think the best way moving forward to help nhs is helping prevention. So for example like cigarettes have warnings on them - shitty sugary foods should also have those warnings e.g this food can contribute to diabetes in high volume foe example. Better education is best way forward to relief pressue on nhs. Obviously there will be cases which cant be like doing your back in or inherited illnesses 

 

Edited July 31 by Demitri_C

[limpid]

39 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

But the first option has been done for how many years and no improvement.  Yes you could argue it was the previous government but wheres all the previous money gone? Surely best way is identifying areas of waste, calculating how much that saves you then top it up? As opposed to throwing  a random number like 9 billion towards it with no plan where its going?

I really do think the best way moving forward to help nhs is helping prevention. So for example like cigarettes have warnings on them - shitty sugary foods should also have those warnings e.g this food can contribute to diabetes in high volume foe example. Better education is best way forward to relief pressue on nhs. Obviously there will be cases which cant be like doing your back in or inherited illnesses 

 

I think we are talking in different languages. So we could use additional tax revenue to start new preventative measures. The last lot raise NI and then dropped it once their donors had been paid.

I'm trying to point out that the two things aren't related and could be done concurrently.

[Straggler]

We need to start throwing money at the NHS:

We have an aging population. More people living longer with more ailments that require more and longer term treatment. This means the NHS has to do more therefore it costs more.

Along side an aging population we have a growing population.  Very simply, looking after more people requires more resource, therefore costs more.

We as a nation ask the NHS to provide more services over time. The NHS as set up was actually quite a simple health care provider (stick a cast on a broken arm, mop your brow when you have a temperature).  It is now asked to treat EVERYTHING.  Long term disease, be it tropical or rare, or common,  it does preventative medicine,  education, research, it deals with mental health which wasn't really a thing when the NHS started but is now recognised as one of the most important things to treat for long term health.  It provides emergency services, disaster coverage and has recently had to rise to the covid pandemic. This is only scratching the surface of everything they do. 

You could look at the enormous breadth of these services and say that some should be removed, but each one you take out will have consequences. 

Alongside our growth in demand of NHS services we have, under the Tories been knowingly failed to fund even allowing the service to stand still without making efficiency savings. The calculations about the increase in cost from an aging and growing population without taking anything else into account are relatively simple to make. The Tories have been funding increases in the £ value but in real terms that amount has not come close to covering the cost of increasing demand. This is the real reason we are seeing the NHS is such decline. We either need to reevaluate what we expect and cut complete services or properly fund them to do what we are asking of them. 

Yes any big organisation has waste. The NHS has inefficiencies.  However the fundamental problems of increase in demand have to be met with appropriate funds to meet them or failure is inevitable.  Cost cutting as demand grows is inviting failure. 

[Davkaus]

Agreed with all of that @Straggler

I would also add that while any large organisation is going to have some inefficiencies, I'd be quite surprised if there's much low hanging fruit to pursue, after all these years of austerity.

When making efficiency savings you've got all the obvious, quick, cheap stuff to solve, right through to stuff that appears inefficient but is actually really tough, expensive, or slow to do better.

If we've not bothered with some of these inefficiencies when being pushed to reduce costs and do more with less for 14 years, I suspect that there's often a reason why.

[tonyh29]

1 hour ago, Straggler said:

We need to start throwing money at the NHS:

We have an aging population. More people living longer with more ailments that require more and longer term treatment. This means the NHS has to do more therefore it costs more.

Along side an aging population we have a growing population.  Very simply, looking after more people requires more resource, therefore costs more.

We as a nation ask the NHS to provide more services over time. The NHS as set up was actually quite a simple health care provider (stick a cast on a broken arm, mop your brow when you have a temperature).  It is now asked to treat EVERYTHING.  Long term disease, be it tropical or rare, or common,  it does preventative medicine,  education, research, it deals with mental health which wasn't really a thing when the NHS started but is now recognised as one of the most important things to treat for long term health.  It provides emergency services, disaster coverage and has recently had to rise to the covid pandemic. This is only scratching the surface of everything they do. 

You could look at the enormous breadth of these services and say that some should be removed, but each one you take out will have consequences. 

Alongside our growth in demand of NHS services we have, under the Tories been knowingly failed to fund even allowing the service to stand still without making efficiency savings. The calculations about the increase in cost from an aging and growing population without taking anything else into account are relatively simple to make. The Tories have been funding increases in the £ value but in real terms that amount has not come close to covering the cost of increasing demand. This is the real reason we are seeing the NHS is such decline. We either need to reevaluate what we expect and cut complete services or properly fund them to do what we are asking of them. 

Yes any big organisation has waste. The NHS has inefficiencies.  However the fundamental problems of increase in demand have to be met with appropriate funds to meet them or failure is inevitable.  Cost cutting as demand grows is inviting failure. 

I went to hospital earlier this year , as it was a heart problem I was give triage fairly quickly , within a few minutes of my arrival 

once they established via ECG it wasn't a heart attack , i went down the pecking order , so In the end I at in a waiting room for 14 hours in some considerable discomfort whilst my heart randomly started racing up to 170 bpm from its usual resting rate of 54 often barely able to breathe , frequently it felt like my stomach was going to explode like Jon Hurt in Alien and I had random bouts of vomiting and blackouts  .. tbh  it was a scary 14 hours  when you suddenly randomly can't breathe , the only real thing keeping me calm was hey I'm at a hospital if it was life threatening I'm in the right place ..

During those 14 hours someone took my blood and I had to give a urine sample  .. I then had to give a blood sample again as they lost my first one , I ended up doing 4 urine samples in the end as they lost the previous 3 and then another blood test as the second one joined the first one on the awol list   .. At one point i was seen by a doctor  who i told everything to , and then 2 hours later I saw another doctor who essentially I did the same thing with all over again  .. hours later I saw a third doctor and yep , went through it all again , he said you look a wreck but he couldn't work out what was wrong other than my blood and urine were fine so he sent me home telling me I should book an appointment with my doctor .( i wont bore you with the details , but I didn't die and eventually the doctors got to the bottom of it and I have medication now that seems to be keeping everything in check , I cheated and went private  , I suspect otherwise I'd still be waiting to be seen ) 

In my 14 hour wait I watched the queue snake out of the waiting room , all the way down the road to the carpark , I qualify it by saying I'm not a doctor but around 80% of the people there seemed to have nothing more than a headache or a cough or little Timmy needed a plaster ( I guess that I didn't' die , you could also put me in that  Malingering  category  !!

 meanwhile in the corridors there were dozens of old people who looked little more than a bag of bones but who seemed to be in real bad way  but couldn't get the treatment due to lack of beds or nurses / Doctors .. 

the system best I could see was clearly failing and as a result amplifying the situation ... I guess funding is the main issue but  there has to be a better way in the first instance to get 80% of those people away from A&E , so the doctors can treat the critical people  promptly 

 

 

 

[markavfc40]

12 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

the system best I could see was clearly failing and as a result amplifying the situation ... I guess funding is the main issue but  there has to be a better way in the first instance to get 80% of those people away from A&E , so the doctors can treat the critical people  promptly

 

There undoubtedly is a better way and it is not so long ago that the A&E you experienced, and I have unfortunately experienced a number of times over the last 10 years or so, wasn't like that.

The below would be a start. Then at the other end of the system making long over due improvements to adult social care to ensure that hospital beds aren't being taken up by elderly patients that could be moved into care homes/cared for in the community but the provision is not available/has been decimated since 2010. 

 

Edited August 1 by markavfc40

[sidcow]

1 hour ago, tonyh29 said:

I went to hospital earlier this year , as it was a heart problem I was give triage fairly quickly , within a few minutes of my arrival 

once they established via ECG it wasn't a heart attack , i went down the pecking order , so In the end I at in a waiting room for 14 hours in some considerable discomfort whilst my heart randomly started racing up to 170 bpm from its usual resting rate of 54 often barely able to breathe , frequently it felt like my stomach was going to explode like Jon Hurt in Alien and I had random bouts of vomiting and blackouts  .. tbh  it was a scary 14 hours  when you suddenly randomly can't breathe , the only real thing keeping me calm was hey I'm at a hospital if it was life threatening I'm in the right place ..

During those 14 hours someone took my blood and I had to give a urine sample  .. I then had to give a blood sample again as they lost my first one , I ended up doing 4 urine samples in the end as they lost the previous 3 and then another blood test as the second one joined the first one on the awol list   .. At one point i was seen by a doctor  who i told everything to , and then 2 hours later I saw another doctor who essentially I did the same thing with all over again  .. hours later I saw a third doctor and yep , went through it all again , he said you look a wreck but he couldn't work out what was wrong other than my blood and urine were fine so he sent me home telling me I should book an appointment with my doctor .( i wont bore you with the details , but I didn't die and eventually the doctors got to the bottom of it and I have medication now that seems to be keeping everything in check , I cheated and went private  , I suspect otherwise I'd still be waiting to be seen ) 

In my 14 hour wait I watched the queue snake out of the waiting room , all the way down the road to the carpark , I qualify it by saying I'm not a doctor but around 80% of the people there seemed to have nothing more than a headache or a cough or little Timmy needed a plaster ( I guess that I didn't' die , you could also put me in that  Malingering  category  !!

 meanwhile in the corridors there were dozens of old people who looked little more than a bag of bones but who seemed to be in real bad way  but couldn't get the treatment due to lack of beds or nurses / Doctors .. 

the system best I could see was clearly failing and as a result amplifying the situation ... I guess funding is the main issue but  there has to be a better way in the first instance to get 80% of those people away from A&E , so the doctors can treat the critical people  promptly 

 

 

 

If you ever watch that Ambulance TV show it's clear that loads of A&E time is taken up by people who can't get to see a GP or have no social services support. 

So the cost cutting in the cheaper areas of the NHS are swamping the most expensive part of The NHS. A very pure example of the false economy of cutting many of those services. 

[tinker]

My mrs deals with hospital visits, the best one was an ae visit for a hamster bite to the hand. It's also about 1% of people who continually go to AE with problems that aren't appropriate,  multiple visits per week.

[bickster]

54 minutes ago, tinker said:

My mrs deals with hospital visits, the best one was an ae visit for a hamster bite to the hand. It's also about 1% of people who continually go to AE with problems that aren't appropriate,  multiple visits per week.

And most of those will be people with complex needs who are either elderly or live in some kind of hostel for recovering drug addicts / homeless and they’ve been taken or send there by the staff. Says someone who ends up being paid to take them there or would be if he didn’t have every hostel / halfway house etched in my memory so never accept the jobs any more

 

[tinker]

12 minutes ago, bickster said:

And most of those will be people with complex needs who are either elderly or live in some kind of hostel for recovering drug addicts / homeless and they’ve been taken or send there by the staff. Says someone who ends up being paid to take them there or would be if he didn’t have every hostel / halfway house etched in my memory so never accept the jobs any more

 

There's also alot of lonely people around who have next to no social interaction,  a visit to AE or an ambulance/ police visit is appealing.

[bickster]

6 minutes ago, tinker said:

There's also alot of lonely people around who have next to no social interaction,  a visit to AE or an ambulance/ police visit is appealing.

Yep that too

[ml1dch]

Given all the righteous kicking off about how Tory MPs shouldn't be interviewing each other, this feels less than ideal particularly given the seriousness of what is being talked about.

 

[Genie]

12 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

Given all the righteous kicking off about how Tory MPs shouldn't be interviewing each other, this feels less than ideal particularly given the seriousness of what is being talked about.

 

Is he supposed to leave the room when a Labour politician is on the show? It’s not the same as what GB News we’re doing with JRM, Dorries and Anderson.

[bickster]

2 minutes ago, Genie said:

Is he supposed to leave the room when a Labour politician is on the show? It’s not the same as what GB News we’re doing with JRM, Dorries and Anderson.

Any other Labour politician, no. His wife.... that really does present a conflict of interests

[Genie]

4 minutes ago, bickster said:

Any other Labour politician, no. His wife.... that really does present a conflict of interests

I didn’t realise it was his wife. I guess it comes down to the content of the segment then. If it’s some hard hitting deep dive into some of her ministerial decisions then it’s not appropriate. If it’s a light fluffy piece and she’s only there because he invited her then no harm done. 

[bickster]

1 minute ago, Genie said:

I didn’t realise it was his wife. I guess it comes down to the content of the segment then. If it’s some hard hitting deep dive into some of her ministerial decisions then it’s not appropriate. If it’s a light fluffy piece and she’s only there because he invited her then no harm done. 

She's the Home Secretary, why do you imagine she was on?

[Genie]

5 minutes ago, bickster said:

She's the Home Secretary, why do you imagine she was on?

Sometimes senior politicians go on shows for a bit of light hearted chat, especially if it’s at the request of her husband for a bit of content filler.