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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

#431

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/

None of those figures are per capita, so it's ignoring population growth.

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

#432
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I said was: if you can wait 12 hours, it's not an emergency. The emergency room is for things where a person couldn't wait 1 hour without dying. People dying 30 days later: not an ER problem.

Nope, the emergency department of an NHS hospital is absolutely not reserved for things where people couldn't wait one hour without dying (or people who are in danger of death period). And since we're talking specifically about the subset of NHS emergency department attendees who are more likely to be dead within 30 days if it takes longer than the NHS' target of four hours for them to receive an inpatient bed, I'm p…

I know NHS works differently from the US, but the health care providers in the US that are used by major corps (IE, benefits) all have urgent care lines. I've done this repeatedly (to avoid my wife going to the ER with a sick kid). Typically, while it takes a month to get a routine appointment, the kid's doctor always can see them the next day for something urgent.

If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense because ERs are tuned for low latency, low throughput, high cost for emergencies, and if lots of people who just need urgent care go, they make it hard for the emergencies to be seen with low latency.

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

#433
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest that the bashing contributed to Boris Johnson being forced (correctly in my opinion) to resign. Not to mention causing many of his former colleagues to read the writing on the wall and finally admit that his honesty was "questionable" (either on TV leadership debates and/or by way of resignation). If the general public was instead expressing extreme satisfaction with the government, I find it unlikely…

Yeah, extensive bashing has achieved the bare minimum, the resignation of Johnson - but, characteristically, in a half-assed way while a lengthy leadership contest happens and the leadership vacuum remains. We're now moving on to strikes, and if the 70s speedrun continues we're likely to see either energy rationing or a mass non-payment of bills, presumably followed by actual riots, until a general election is finall…

I don't believe it's going to get quite that bad, but I agree that they need to get a move on and get back to some form of stable government quickly (even if the people in power are not necessarily who I'd choose).

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While your point about aircraft landings is funny, I'm guessing general aviation in Canada is similar to that of the US. It's not really uncommon for planes to land on highways in the US. Even busy ones. It just isn't very interesting to be honest, so no one makes much point about it. I think the FAA publishes numbers on that sort of thing.

You're missing the point. The 40x series highways around Toronto are some of the most gridlocked transportation networks in North America. I believe often ranking worse than LA or Atlanta etc etc. The 401 is pretty much bumper to bumper every single day all day except maybe at like 3am. The 407 toll route the author is describing takes basically the same route as the gridlocked 401. The toll on the highway is insanel…

I've been around Toronto and agree: the roads are mostly parking lots. I actually wonder if the low average speed reduces the cost of maintenance since the roadway should be less worn.

But aren't tolls meant to be set high enough to discourage their use? Otherwise the average travel time on them would be about the same as the untolled route.

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

#435

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…

Funding may go up but demand increases more because UK population is old and overweight… and getting more so. This is the reality of an aging population plus socialised health care.

Add at least 60,000 illegal immigrants each year: https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-53734793

Who are likely to be entering the country already with health problems.

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

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. The 40x series highways around Toronto are some of the most gridlocked transportation networks in North America. I believe often ranking worse than LA or Atlanta etc etc. The 401 is pretty much bumper to bumper every single day all day except maybe at like 3am. The 407 toll route the author is describing takes basically the same route as the gridlocked 401. The toll on the highway is insanel…

I've been around Toronto and agree: the roads are mostly parking lots. I actually wonder if the low average speed reduces the cost of maintenance since the roadway should be less worn. But aren't tolls meant to be set high enough to discourage their use? Otherwise the average travel time on them would be about the same as the untolled route.

The 407 could likely handle 3, 4 times the capacity it holds right now.

I don't know what the elasticity situation and supply/demand looks like for that highway. I can guarantee you that the owners do, and they've set it accordingly to accomplish their goals ($$). But not necessarily the goals the benefit the city.

For me it's the difference between being able to work at certain employers in the west end of the GTA vs not. The fee, paid daily, would be a big nope to me. And I'm upper middle class.

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

#437
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the water companies were state owned, dealing with the pollution would still cost money and there are a bazillion other demands on the state's finances which are more pressing than keeping rivers clean, such as providing healthcare. This isn't a hypothetical. Scotland has a state-owned water company, and it'd be impossible to write an article like this about theirs not because they're doing better - all indic…

If your entire argument is "better things aren't possible" and "it's bad in other places too" then that's pretty weak

No, the argument is that nationalisation/privatisation is irrelevant to the problem at hand. There is no causality, there are plenty of examples of well-regulated private companies and disastrous state-owned ones. There might be a correlation, but you didn't show any numbers to that effect.

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ambulance is a portable "mini" ER room...

Using a parked ambulance as an ER room is gross mismanagement because the 'waiting room' for an ambulance 'ER room' is casualties spread across the entire city, such that the worst cannot be prioritized. Even if the hospital's ER room has saturated capacity, moving all the casualties to the hospital waiting room as rapidly as possible still has utility because that allows the hospital to prioritize the worst, which t…

I’m happy that healthcare workers tend to be more empathic than what you are suggesting and will take care of patients end-to-end. You can’t load balance sick humans on the fly to achieve some optimal outcome.

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

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can both blame people and society. Modern living makes it easy to be fat, but plenty of us don’t succumb to the temptation of easy meals and overeating. I’m not sure how you’d even change modern life to get around this, save maybe for incredibly large sin taxes on everything from soda to every restaurant. I’m sure we’ll just end up with a pill sometime soon. Semaglutide comes close.

Can I introduce you to semaglutides newer, better cousin, tirzepatide? https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2206038?query=TO... 50% of participants on 10 and 15mg doses lost 20% of initial body weight!

Believe you me, my stock portfolio knows about it.
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