Further to Quej's post on the main board, use this to rant about your Health Service.....You'll need to give me a couple of hours to compose myself......

Having needed the NHS in the past...
I went from: 15% chance of making 28 and losing a leg
to: still here many years on and still have both legs
Also work (2nd job) in NHS
I think the NHS is bl**dy brilliant but.......
The problem as I see it is 'tick box politics'
There are to many targets and policies that have to considered
Far too much interference from number 10
Doctors, Nurses and Hospitals have to make sure they tick various boxes to get the funding. It's not just a case of dealing with a patient and whatever ailment/injury. If you go and see your GP and they say 'I haven't taken your blood pressure recently' It's b/c to make sure your GP gets all their funding they have to tick so many checked blood pressure boxes and various other boxes as well as deal with why you went in the first place and all in a 10 appointment.
Hospitals now have army's of managers to chase targets etc and they all need company cars, office space etc
Super bugs exist b/c the prats in government think that cleaning a hospital is just like cleaning an office and budget accordingly
The government needs to let doctors, consultants etc make the decisions and get rid of the ridiculous amount of admin that is draining funding away from patient care. My local hospital even has a pillow manager FFS !!!

When my pops had his heart bypass, all the staff, from consultants to nurses to the bloke who came and did a little talk afterwards, were ace

Having said that, when I worked for them in their 'shared services' building, I thought it was shit.

considering i work on the front line in the NHS, ill try to tell you what the main cause is, money is one issue, and its not the lack of it, its just going to the wrong places,

the second issue is power and control bieng taken off the people who use it best and given to new "managers" who have no medical experience, but come from banking, and such and such,

decisions are made by comitees of people not on the ward, people who i never see, people who tell me i run my ward, but cant make any decisions.

People who thought the conservavtives destroyed the NHS, are right, but labour have destroyed it by an even greater magnitude since theyve been in power,

I am not given the recources to do my job properly, to give people the care i want to give and should be giving, despite having no staff, i get no money to employ nurses, yet, manager after mangaer gets employed were i work at 60k plus week after week, to solve theses problems,

Its fucking easy to solve, sack all the clipboard managers, give us the control back

I too work in the NHS, for twenty odd years as a nurse on what is euphemistically referred to as the frontline - and that is in itself the problem. All over the NHS there are people doing a really good job and others not so, but one thing they all have in common is that they are all on the front line. If their job was not crucial to the number one mission - patient care - they wouldn't be there. Now some of them are thoroughly misplaced. I know of one middle to senior manager whose experience was to run a failing corner shop before going into the NHS. I work in training and education now, and our efforts started about five years ago, what we did took four years to come to fruition, but are one of the prime reasons people don't spend as long in A&E anymore.

The saddest thing about working in that organisation is this. People die. It always breaks my heart when I see the mortuary trolley being pushed through the corridors, and on a couple of occasions recently I have seen it coming in and going out of children's intensive care. Even after 20 years plus of dealing with human suffering it still knocks me back when someone dies - even if I never met them.

Sure there are bad workers, some who can't be bothered, but they are becoming fewer and fewer as their workmates won't put up with them. There are some very accomplished skivers - I can't go into details for obvious reasons but what would you say if you knew that someone somewhere is being paid fulltime who hasn't worked for more than three years. As it happens they've done nothing (procedurally) wrong, but they are playing the system and have none of the primary quality required to work in today's NHS and that is compassion.

The other thing to take into consideration are these very sad cases of people who go to the courts to get expensive or unlicensed treatment. That expenditure cannot be budgeted for, and when that is ordered to be spent by a judge on the back of a media campaign, that money is taken from somewhere else. That is why there are so many agency staff on the wards. It is cheaper to pay for - no pension contributions, no holiday pay.

My condolences to anyone - especially Quej - who has lost someone dear to them, but the NHS deals in life...... and death.

im not even allowed agency or bank staff any more, as there isnt a budget for that anymore, everything in your post is spot on.

Totally agree with SS.

There are Good workers and Poor/Bad workers in all industries. In most places the bad workers can hide amongst the work of the good ones. But unfortunately NHS or any other industry where lives are concerned there should not be any tollerance for bad work. As they then give the whole system a poor reputation and takes long time for people to have faith in the system.

As regards to the lack of funds or mismanagement of funds, well its just hard to beleive that some NHS managers will sanction spending fortune on Non essential things as pointed out by NW on the main MB. How can one justify some of the expenditure is beyond belief.

6 Weeks ago, I had an accident on My scooter, I dislocated my Thumb and very heavy bruising to hips and legs. I had to wait in A&E for 4 hours before my thumb was XRayed and then the dislocation Popped back. The registrar who put it back said it will hurt a lot more now as the Inflamation has set in and it would have been a lot better if it was attended to couple of hours earlier. Plus due to the delay in popping it back the healing period is now prolonged, it will take approx. 4-6 months for it to Heal and for me to get full strength back in that Thumb. I am not so sure whos fault is that, system or individuals. But all credit to the Doctors who have to work in the A&E dept.

Most of what I was going to say has been covered. My main point was going to be a whinge about an unspecified colleague or two and the way agenda for change was implemented. Agenda for change was a long procedure where everyone's job description was graded and put on a common scale (everyone apart from doctors who are obviously far far cleverer than us proles!).

The fact is that various people I can think of, who are supposed to be managers and could not manage their way out of a paper bag, got high gradings is my main gripe. These people now have very high paid jobs and have no prospect of ever getting an equivalent one anywhere else - their appraisals are generally poor and they never achieve anything, therefore they will not be employed by anyone other than the NHS trust I happen to work for.

You would have thought that they would have graded the performance of someone as well as grading their job description...this is the kind of management incompetence you see all the time in the NHS. The upgrading that these people got annoyed 95% of people in the dept, but no-one does anything!

This point made by SS is a massive problem I guess most people are not aware of. I'm a Clinical Scientist working in Haematological Oncology, and am acutely aware of the cost of some of the new drugs coming through - up to £30,000 per patient per year for some!!!

And not forgetting the Herceptin debacle....

I dont know what the problem is with the NHS. I dont work in it and do not have the necessary experience to form an educated opinion. All I know is through my own experiences with the NHS and they have on a whole be bad experiences. I have read your posts and think you are all probably right to some degree but I find it hard to believe how middle management can be at fault for instances like: -

A doctor/nurse (Whoever) pushing a needle so far into Richards Stomach that it came out through his back and dug into the mattress.

I dont know who is at fault for a nurse failing to pick up a urine sample of Richards, which sat on his bedside unit the WHOLE DAY, at which point the Nurse wanted to throw it away (incidentally, this was the final days sample of a 5 day testing course).

Did middle management force the two doctors to argue (in front of Richard) over what they thought was the best course of treatment?

My own dealing with the NHS have not been any better (on a whole). I personally waited 8 years (Yes, that does say 8 YEARS) for an operation on my Cruciate Ligament, and then had to wait for 3 month after the operation for proper physio.

After a Rugby injury a couple of years ago I sat in A&E for 6 hours, only to be moved to a room/cubicle to have to wait another hour and a half for the Doctor to eventually appear to see me.

Dont get me wrong guys, I am not having a go at nurses and doctors (there are enough people who do that). I am only telling you of my experiences and the flip side of these occasions is when my first child was in a high dependancy unit after birth (with a collapsed lung), the staff were outstanding. Also the staff in the HDU where Richard died worked way above and beyond their stations. They were brilliant with not only Richard, but family members too. I appreciate that any organisation has it's good and bad points.

The difference is that an organisation like the NHS CAN NOT and MUST NOT have the bad points. It's no good saying that the NHS deals with Life and death and thats a fact of life. It's not the fact that it deals with life and death, it's HOW it deals with these issues. That's the important point.