Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 461 posts

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

#121

Post by DanBC »

buro9 wrote: post #99
jrochkind1 wrote: post #68

I hadn't (here in the USA) heard anything about "collapse of emergency healthcare in England" -- can anyone provide some links for some context? What is actually going on, and (to the extent people know/educated guess) why? Have wait times been gradually increasing, or has there been a sudden increase? ("collapse" sounds sudden?) Etc etc.

The Conservative Party have been in power for 12 years. When they gained power they pursued a policy of "austerity" to reduce the size of the govt and local govt, reduce the funding of nationally funded things, and to replace such govt owned things with "public private partnerships". This can be seen everywhere from social care (private care homes), schools (academy schools), transport (where area contracts are bid f…

> the NHS as it is constructed doesn't allow for this.

This is simply untrue. (What is Livewell South West?) We've had private provision of NHS services for years and the Lansley reforms explicitly embed privatisation (state funded private provision) in the NHS. Commissioners are forbidden by the 2012 law from preferring NHS providers over NHS providers.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/7/section/75/enact...

We have a lot of private provision of NHS services (all GP practices are private providers!) and it just doesn't work.

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

#122

Post by SantalBlush »

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #89
bzxcvbn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA have tried, it doesn't work. People still wait hours and hours in the ER. They just have to pay thousands for the privilege.

doesn't work? there are urgent care places everywhere

The last time I was in an urgent care facility, the doctor tried to upsell us on a medical procedure. When he left the room, the nurse assured us the procedure was unnecessary and he just wanted to charge us more. I wish I were making this up.

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

#123

Post by DanBC »

drumhead wrote: post #108

Emergency care hasn't "collapsed". It's under strain from a backlog cases unseen during the pandemic. But collapsed? No.

What would collapse look like?

If people are queueing in an ambo for 12 hours why isn't that a sign of collapse?

If people are dying of stroke or heart attack at greater rates, because they can't get ED care, why isn't that a sign of collapse?

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

#124

Post by xtracto »

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 is too bad that corrupt government officials keep systemically defunding Social Health programs with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense). Then they point to the deficient healthcare and blame the "socialized" aspect of it for the issues.

Here in Mexico we've seen it all play out: We had an amazing social healthcare system (in the form of the IMSS) in the 70s and 80s. But the corrupt government officials kept dismantling it and allowing corruption to run rampant within the system. All to get a piece of the private for-profit health system including Health Insurance.

Back in 2004 when I lived in the UK, the NHS was really good. And I remember hearing at that time that it was nothing compared to the NHS in the 80s and 90s. I seriously hope it doesn't have the same outcome as our system had in Mexico. For-profit health is inhumane.

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

#125

Post by xtracto »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #43

I don't have time to go in depth on this but I'm a bit skeptical of the claims here After adjusting for age, the english excess death rate is 5% above. It is the highest. But it also just came from being the lowest several months ago. How much natural variance is in this data. Is this moment noteworthy? Is it possible we're not seeing more people die sooner but rather a large chunk of people putting off death a few m…

Aaah, so this might only be a paid shill with a bait for the pro-privatization of healthcare looking to push for a for-profit health system.

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

#126

Post by DanBC »

simonswords82 wrote: post #95
M2Ys4U wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This Twitter chap" is a journalist at the Financial Times and is a senior fellow at the London School of Economics. He's not just some rando bashing government...

So you're saying as a result of these two positions that he holds he cannot possibly be wrong and I should blindly trust anything he says so long as he shows some workings?

You don't have to blindly trust him, but so far he's provided a bunch of data to support his position and you've provided nothing.

Show me the data.

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

#127

Post by spywaregorilla »

ectopod wrote: post #115
spywaregorilla wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But my point is that this seems to have been a gradually growing problem for some time, but the recent spike from covid is likely a temporary bump greatly exacerbating it. It'll drop down again. Then, gradually, climb back up to where it is now. If it reverts to the mean quickly, it still won't take that long to get to where it transiently is now based on a straight line trend so maybe it's just a point of pedantry.…

When you have a system with no spare capacity a sudden spike in demand causes queue lengths to grow but they never get shorter again . That's the theory. In reality, the rising death rate will cause a drop in demand.

That could be true of some queueing systems, but its certainly not true of all queuing systems. It is certainly not true of this system because you cannot stay in the queue forever. Over the long term this will converge on a steady state determined by rate of arrival and rate of departure, treated or otherwise, and nothing else.

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

#128

Post by spywaregorilla »

xtracto wrote: post #125
spywaregorilla wrote: post #43

I don't have time to go in depth on this but I'm a bit skeptical of the claims here After adjusting for age, the english excess death rate is 5% above. It is the highest. But it also just came from being the lowest several months ago. How much natural variance is in this data. Is this moment noteworthy? Is it possible we're not seeing more people die sooner but rather a large chunk of people putting off death a few m…

Aaah, so this might only be a paid shill with a bait for the pro-privatization of healthcare looking to push for a for-profit health system.

Not at all. The data presented here is very informative and generally hits on a very important problem. I just disagree with the short term takeaways.

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

#129

Post by pas »

simonswords82 wrote: post #25

For those not from the UK there’s a wider narrative at play here. Any and all government bashing is almost a national sport and pastime at this stage. Throw in some numbers to try to prove your point and you’re going to be well received. So there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Perhaps this Twitter chap is talking rubbish too. For the record not saying our government is perfect but holy heck it’s hard to keep up…

the 12+ hour wait times, the hospital occupancy, the aging population and slashed social spending are all hard data. if you want just ignore everything about the excess mortality, and you'll still get the same picture, it's not gonna look nice anyway you dice it.

healthcare (and education) are both incredibly big outliers in the last decades of technological progress (incredible diminishing returns, just look at US spending, brutal Baumol effect, since almost everything is still manual labor .. every MRI/CT requires more professional labor, every new drug requires more tests and consultations, and so on).

no wonder it's looking worse and worse when compared to total GDP of aging populations.

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

#130

Post by simonswords82 »

pjc50 wrote: post #57
simonswords82 wrote: post #25

For those not from the UK there’s a wider narrative at play here. Any and all government bashing is almost a national sport and pastime at this stage. Throw in some numbers to try to prove your point and you’re going to be well received. So there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Perhaps this Twitter chap is talking rubbish too. For the record not saying our government is perfect but holy heck it’s hard to keep up…

> Any and all government bashing They're doing incredibly badly despite friendly press support, are leaderless after the misconduct got too much even for the Tory party, and are facing some really serious problems this winter if energy prices match projections. In the meantime they waste time on culture war nonsense. They're not being bashed enough .

Well bashing doesn't appear to be changing anything so can we try something else perhaps?
Post reply on HN