this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
7 points (76.9% liked)

UK Politics

3023 readers
121 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 12 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

They can't keep going with the current setup due to how changing demographics are producing increased demands on the NHS. People using the service are much older, with more complicated diseases, then ever envisioned when we designed the systems.

Beaurocracy is causing inefficiencies due to too much red tape. We spent £5.1 billion on "costs of harm" in the year 2023/24 which is quite a large amount of the £160 billion total budget. Running total of outstanding compensation claims was recently £83 billion. We need a way to fix the processes to prevent these clinical failures or find some way to cap the amount of compensation claimed.

Additionally the use of short term contractors is hemmoraging money. Often the management will give IT contracts to large firms like accenture who fail to deliver semi-regularly while charging a premium. NHS administrators frequently use the big names because they are recognisable instead of interrogating which company is actually best placed to deliver.

I'd personally be happy with looking more closely about how other European countries handle healthcare. They seem to spend less for better outcomes, while ensuring that everyone who needs medical treatment receives it. If it can save lives we shouldn't be too ideological.

Edit: In Scotland health is devolved, we get higher levels of funding per capita due to the Barnett Formula, and lastly income tax is higher to provide more money to the NHS. Outcomes are actually worse here than in England due to mismanagement. Seems like an example of more funding not being a silver bullet.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

odd how labour has no time to properly fund the nhs but they have time pushing pro crypto bills in the commons.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Has time got anything to do with it.

Seems money is the root of the debate. More specifically, how or if it should be provided by the government.

And while I personally am pretty left of centre on taxing the rich or corporations.

It is pretty darn hard to argue Labour as it stands now has any political mandate to do so. It sure as hell was not the policy they won the election on.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

never thought id see the day that the nhs was killed by a so called labour government

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Oh god. I knew this Tory bot would be at it again.

Fuck off, I dont want the government throwing more money at the NHS for it to be passed to mandatory contracts with Tory chums.

I suppose you supported the billions spent on shitty COVID waste when it went via the NHS.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 days ago

i mean mandatory contracts with tory chums is wes streetings dream.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago (1 children)

"No more money without reform," is the actual line.

Perhaps seeing it distorted as per the headline is to be expected of the Morning Star.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

you cant reform the nhs without more funding since its funding has been slashed for a decade.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The main issue is more funding won't help; all it does is patch things up, and the root causes of the issues never get solved.

With reform, you could remove bureaucracy where it causes issues and add it where there's breakdowns in communications instead of just adding more funding to improve capacity in one obvious area and expose a bottleneck immediately before or after it, making the majority of the extra funding wasted

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

It's usually a good idea to patch a ship before it sinks, rather than re-arrange the deck chairs.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

agreed.

But you need a viable plan for reform. Or you are just throwing money at the problem.

Assuming the most forgiving interpretation of his statements. (not saying we should, just avoiding bias)

“No more money without reform,” could indicate he expects the NHS to agree to a policy of reform before throwing any more money at it.