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Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

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Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#91

Post by RobotToaster »

lettergram wrote: post #45
jajahusjsna wrote: post #8

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for t…

> Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. If this were the true issue, the excess deaths would have been starting at peak Covid hospitalization. In fact the opposite is true… That said, particularly on any bureaucracy- more money doesn’t solve issues. In fact, more money often makes more bureaucracy. Obviously that’s no…

Not necessarily, many life saving operations for things like cancer were postponed during that time, we could be seeing the result of that now.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#93

Post by trashtester »

sokoloff wrote: post #6
funstuff007 wrote: post #2

Of course this is real problem, but like most things COVID related the public discourse has been 90% culture war, and 10% search for understanding.

I’ve really been amazed at the lack of curiosity and ability/willingness to hold multiple probability-weighted points of view at once and examine questions like “what would have to be true/false in order for us to commit to X?”, “once we’ve started to do Y, what would be the signals for us to stop doing Y?” I had thought that people were often impatient and disinterested in hard thinking, but the extent of it surpris…

It seems to me that most people are able to think in terms of probabilities (or degrees, more generally) most of the time. Those people need to split the world into safe/dangerous, good/bad, likely/impossible. Also, they tend to not gradually update beliefs based on data the way Bayes' Theorem would dictate, but will often go directly from one extreme to the other.

Some will tend to add an additional level of "unknown", but even in that case, they tend to go for "as likely as not" 50/50 odds, not 80/20, 90/10 or 99.9/0.1, based on evidence.

Maybe doubt/uncertainty is too much of a cognitive and emotional load?

For topics that are also seen as essential symbols of some social group (religion, culture war side, nation), the number who will admit shades of gray fall even further, of course.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#94

Post by ben_w »

thrown_22 wrote: post #46
solar-ice wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; the reason people exonerate it is that the Tories have been threatening the population with a dismantling and privatisation of the NHS for over a decade now, and that's not what anyone wants. People want the NHS to work, to be funded and managed appropriately. A primary reason it doesn't is the Tories crippling it.

The left has somehow ended up as the party of the political managerial class instead of the working class, this is one of the best explanations why we're in such a weird place where the socialists are all trust fund kids who would rather have the working class arrested than talk to them.

If the (UK) left is the party of the political managerial class, what is the (UK) right? When I'm feeling particularly sarcastic I might call them the party of dilettantes, but is that apt?

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#95

Post by retcore »

doliveira wrote: post #67
ogogmad wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person I'm speaking to claims that the NHS hires too many bureaucrats who are impossible to fire, and who he believes provide the doctors with too much paperwork. He suggests that instead of paying those bureaucrats, the money should go to doctors, nurses and equipment. He claims that the NHS gets about the same amount of money - GDP-wise - as other European countries, while underperforming them. They already hir…

These days doctors seem to spend more time doing paperwork than actually working.

That's because each of the several hundred billions of pounds of greenfield government software programmes is a slapdash crud forms exercise bugger the millions of man years of development by the original experts despite there's little to change in the vast majority of diagnostic pathways. In fact the Reed Codes which resulted from a immense pan European study of two decades length and became canon in ca 1988 remain canonical the only programming work involved in new processes being parsing these together with inserting a myriad of OR impedence where new forms of graft are inserted. We've just switched off national critical systems of civic function across the board over the past few years. Probate about the most egregious example the replacement system containing a mere handful out of the estimated twenty thousand expert legal assessment rules at inception. Manual operations the only alternative for at least two years that I was paying attention.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#96

Post by lotsofpulp »

heisenbit wrote: post #87
mensetmanusman wrote: post #54

How has brexit affected the nhs?

Here in Germany the health care system is severely stressed particular nurses are hard to come by. Nurses and young doctors were often coming from other EU countries but Covid slowed this migration. I could imagine the situation in Britain much worse due to Brexit and quite possibly and even higher reliance on foreign skilled health care labour.

> reliance on foreign skilled health care labour.

I think it is more accurate to say cheap labor.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#97

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

throwawayacc2 wrote: post #66
jajahusjsna wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> One can be concerned about both. I didn’t say that you couldn’t. But by voting for the current day Tory’s you are choosing to decimate the health system and waste money on sending Refugees to Rwanda. It’s idiotic to prioritise that over the NHS.

>> decimate the health system and waste money on sending Refugees to Rwanda. It’s idiotic to prioritise that over the NHS. It all depends how you view the world. For many people, preserving the historical character and demographic of their country is an important issue. It might not be to you, you might consider it stupid, but it is a concern many people have. So much so, they would see illegal arrivals of non histor…

Wait, I’m seriously confused by this. If preserving the character of one’s country is an important issue, is the NHS not part of the character of the UK? My understanding is the NHS is one of the defining symbols of the UK, a showing of communal strength and compassion, the Western sensibility in the face of the devastation of war. It touches everyone who lives there, is born there, and often when they die there. It’s erosion is changing every single citizen by shaking their faith in the underlying values the institution represents. Isn’t that a way bigger change?

Genuinely, why are refugees something to be prioritized over a cultural touchstone institution if the goal is preserving historical character?

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#98

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

ogogmad wrote: post #38
jajahusjsna wrote: post #8

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for t…

One person I'm speaking to claims that the NHS hires too many bureaucrats who are impossible to fire, and who he believes provide the doctors with too much paperwork. He suggests that instead of paying those bureaucrats, the money should go to doctors, nurses and equipment. He claims that the NHS gets about the same amount of money - GDP-wise - as other European countries, while underperforming them. They already hir…

As someone who was embedded in the NHS for a number of years it has many problems, but counterintuitively one of them is actually a lack of paper pushers or at least low level admin and other auxiliary staff.

Because governments have constantly demanded the NHS spend less money, but have also been under pressure to preserve numbers of "front line" staff you've ended up with serious shortages of low level admins, medical secretaries, receptionists, finance officers etc. This means that more and more healthcare workers spend their time doing paperwork or customer service work that could be done by anyone. I worked out of one of the largest genomic diagnostic labs in the country with over 150 clinical geneticists, nurses, scientists and consultants and there were 4 admins. That meant nurses were staffing reception, consultants were managing their own diaries, geneticists were doing stock takes and clinical scientists were packaging up and booking samples onto DHL for collection. This was not an efficient way of working, but the lab had a hard ban on hiring any non "front line" staff. And it had been running like that for years.

The trust as a whole had the same problem on a macro scale. There weren't enough finance officers so invoices didn't get paid or debtors chased (the NHS provides a lot of private services as well). Because of a lack of staff working in recruitment it could take months (4 in my case) between being given a job offer and the paperwork being in place to actually start. Payroll was a nightmare because of lack of staff and multiple unintegrated time recording systems, many of them to this day paper based.

A large number of legacy patient records are still paper based and have to be physically moved around and digitised "on the fly" but because the NHS is supposed to be digital there aren't enough porters payed to literally push the trolleys of records around so you end up with nurses doing it.

I could go on for a long time but you get the idea.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#99

Post by tremon »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #71
jajahusjsna wrote: post #8

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for t…

Maybe I'm just a nerd, but this bit: > Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone) Doesn't really strike me as a bad thing in itself. Once you get past the front line, things get pretty specialist and a general move to Telemedicine is probably a good thing, and is presumably happening all around the world for all sorts of reasons. People even do telesurgery now. And…

Once you get past the front line, things get pretty specialist

But isn't a GP (general practicioner) exactly the front line of which you speak?

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#100

Post by [deleted] »

jajahusjsna wrote: post #8

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for t…

[deleted]
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