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Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

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Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#341

Post by relativ575 »

trs8080 wrote: post #274
WalterBright wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same goes for South America. Yet they remain mired in poverty thanks to their predilection for socialism.

Actually they remain mired in poverty largely because the US keeps meddling in their affairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... So it's more like "they remain mired in poverty because of the United States' predilection for predatory capitalism."

Notice how on that list none of South America countries appear after 1990s? Venezuela has been hostile to the US, yet they are still there. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia have elected socialism-leaning governments multiple times during the last 30 years. Not to mention Nicaragua or Mexico, that are not considered South America. Colombia is the latest example. So they are poor because of US meddling, and not even a tiny part due to their policies? You have to try harder if you want to blame their issues on the US.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#343

Post by makomk »

oliwarner wrote: post #299
MichaelCollins wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hard to believe. Just wheel the patient through the front door and let the hospital do the babysitting. There is no sense in using an ambulance as a waiting room.

Babysitting? These are patients deemed medically unfit enough to bring in. Who's looking after them after they're turfed out the ambulance? Every bed in every bay in A&E is occupied, each with an allocated nursing provision. Oh we just double the number of nurses? Yeah, but no. They don't grow on trees. The current ones don't stretch (we asked). You can't just absorb 20-40 patients into your acute departments without…

I don't really see how patients so severely ill that they need a bed in A&E with dedicated nursing provision could be discharged into community social care, though maybe I'm missing something...

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#344

Post by trs8080 »

relativ575 wrote: post #341
trs8080 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually they remain mired in poverty largely because the US keeps meddling in their affairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... So it's more like "they remain mired in poverty because of the United States' predilection for predatory capitalism."

Notice how on that list none of South America countries appear after 1990s? Venezuela has been hostile to the US, yet they are still there. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia have elected socialism-leaning governments multiple times during the last 30 years. Not to mention Nicaragua or Mexico, that are not considered South America. Colombia is the latest example. So they are poor because of US meddling,…

> Notice how on that list none of South America countries appear after 1990s?

This is regime change /that we know about/. Intelligence agencies haven't made a huge habit of discussing their covert successes.

> Venezuela has been hostile to the US, yet they are still there.

Yes, because the international response would be quite severe if the US decided to what - destroy Venezuela?

Foreign occupations and coups decimate countries who then have to deal with the effects for generations. The new regime is usually beholden to the powers that put it there (or the old one has to abide by the occupier's demands), permanently crippling the government or the economy or both. Many countries continue to suffer under the conditions created by their overthrowers, so maybe they share some blame but it's largely the longlasting effects of foreign incursions.

> You have to try harder if you want to blame their issues on the US.

It's really not that difficult to understand cause and effect here. If you destroy a country's economy, divide its people, cripple it's infrastructure, and install an authoritarian government, it's going to take a long time to recover.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#345

Post by amrocha »

lambdadmitry wrote: post #334
jmfldn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a failure of privitisation 30 years in the making since water and waste management was privatised in 1989 here in the UK. Of course you can lay some blame at the door of the regulator but let's not forget the tens of billions that have been siphoned off to shareholders and fatcat CEOs, some of whom are arguably criminally negligent and should be put on trial for the catastrophes that have become apparent in rece…

I really don't like this kind of knee-jerk "privatisation bad, fatcat CEOs bad" reaction sadly prevalent in the UK. Let's talk about the underlying argument, shall we? Firstly, you're talking about a failure of a regulator to regulate an industry and prosecute alleged perpetrators, and the implied solution is to… nationalise the industry, somehow assuming the nationalised entity will be managed better by the very sam…

How can you look at horrible evil companies literally destroying the environment around us just because it makes them more money and say there's no alternative??? If you need a regulator to make sure companies don't literally dump sewage all over the country then it's pretty clear that this is a failed system with bad incentives.

What pressures would a nationalized system have? How about the fact that normal people don't want to ruin the environment around them? You don't need additional pressure to make sure that doesn't happen. If you stop optimizing for short term money the problem goes away.

And I don't give a shit about private budgets. The government doesn't need that shit, it can create money as it needs to allocate resources. And if it needs to reduce money supply that's what taxation is for.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#346

Post by refurb »

pjc50 wrote: post #148
refurb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know. What I'm saying is that what people see as manipulation of voters (nobody could ever believe that!) is actually just another valid opinion that you so happen to disagree with. Nobody was deceived. Nobody was manipulated. The voters just don't agree with you on this issue.

This is silly: all kinds of promises were made for Brexit, and if they weren't delivered then those expecting them are at least disappointed, and if there was no reasonable way they could have been delivered and no real effort to deliver them, then they absolutely were deceived. How did the "£350m for the NHS" bus work out? > actually just another valid opinion Some opinions - sky is green, earth is flat - aren't val…

> Some opinions - sky is green, earth is flat - aren't valid.

You just proved my point. You can’t possibly wrap your head around why someone would vote to leave the EU so clearly someone manipulated them.

This is the kind of thing people said when women wanted to the right to vote - "Oh those silly women, manipulated to think that's what they want."

It's dangerous thinking. I prefer to have faith that people are generally educated about issues and make the decision they feel is right.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#348

Post by makomk »

londons_explore wrote: post #266
mattlondon wrote: post #234

As a UK tax payer, and as a UK tax payer that winces every time they see how much they lose to taxation in their P60 each year (six figures in tax), what are people's solutions to this? It seems like the NHS budget keeps on going up and up and up [1], as does the number of doctors and nurses (while "managers" has either declined or stayed relatively static) [2]. So NHS is getting more funding, and there are more doct…

Is it possible the NHS took on lots of 'bad deals' in the 2000's, and is now having to repay them? Things like a "Get this cheap building, but now you're locked into paying inflated rent and service charges on it every year for the next 50 years"

Oh yes. There's a comment elsewhere talking about how the Blair-Brown years had heavy NHS investment and how they used PFIs to fudge the numbers, and that's exactly how it worked - instead of paying the upfront cost of, say, a new hospital they got a private sector firm to build it and committed future governments to paying a bunch of expensive fees to that firm for decades. So they got lots of nice fancy NHS investments and improvements to point at whilst eating into the capacity of every future government to fund... well, everything really. It wasn't sustainable at all.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#349

Post by Quarrelsome »

vorpalhex wrote: post #212
oliwarner wrote: post #116

This isn't a collapse of emergency healthcare, it's a very predicted collapse of community social care: hospitals can't discharge if they need a care home place that doesn't exist. Without inpatient bed availability, ERs and AMUs can't admit to specialties and everything gums up at the front door. Let's be clear: we do need many more doctors and nurses, but the existing ones can't do their jobs because their wards ha…

It appears NHS funding has increased year over year: https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/

you're misunderstanding the issue. NHS funding _always_ increases. Its not increased by enough and social care (a different budget) has been cut meaning that hospitals have to deal with patients that have nowhere to be discharged.

This is all due to 2008 can kicking. The needed to cut, didn't want to get blamed for cutting so just massively cut central funding for councils who were left to make the hard decisions. Year on year the cuts increased the drive for "efficiencies" grew. There is no slack left and nothing left to cut that isn't obvious.

I hope that someone learns that just because you've taken the cost of the balance sheet doesn't mean the problem it was solving goes away, it just ends up as an inefficiency somewhere else, in this case in the NHS where staff cannot discharge perfectly healthy patients.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#350

Post by tenpies »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #199

My 80 year old grandfather was due for a knee operation and it was delayed twice. On the day after the second time it was delayed, his knee collapsed and he smacked his head on the concrete floor. His speech was slurred, his vision was affected, and he was in extreme pain. Bearing in mind in his younger years he's had eyes slashed open and fingers cut off, so he has a high pain threshold. The ambulance took six hours…

Not that it helps, but this is happening in most Western countries.

In Canada, healthcare has similarly collapsed. Decades of mismanagement and absurd government policy finally broke the system during the COVID lockdowns and now the system is worst than many third world countries.

Like in your example, it will take hours to get ambulance and I don't mean in some rural town in Canada, I mean in downtown Toronto. Most people are just Ubering or getting driven to the hospital and camping out at the ER - and I do mean camping because it could easily be a day's wait for something fairly urgent. We've had plenty of people die in waiting rooms this year.

The worst part is there is no private system allowed here - in fact the provincial BC court recently ruled that private health clinics operating outside the public system are not allowed[1]. As a Canadian you no do not have a right to healthcare if that healthcare is private - your choice is die in the public system's waiting room or hopefully be rich enough to fly to the US for care.

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[1] https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/practice-areas/litigation/...

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