[arista]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ree-years.html

[UserSince2005]

And the staff want a pay rise? The state of the NHS. Just abolish it.

[LeatherTrumpet]

meanwhile the staff are on strike wanting more and more money

[Niamh.]

That's outrageous

[Soldier Boy]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

meanwhile the staff are on strike wanting more and more money

Yes this is part of the effect of woefully underfunding the NHS. Everywhere is short-staffed and safeguarding is in tatters. But why not, let's just continue the downwards slide and watch it get worse year-on-year.

[LeatherTrumpet]

Originally Posted by Soldier Boy

Yes this is part of the effect of woefully underfunding the NHS. Everywhere is short-staffed and safeguarding is in tatters. But why not, let's just continue the downwards slide and watch it get worse year-on-year.

Or its incredibly badly run. Seems that everyone is happy to give the NHS a pass on scrutiny and efficiency and just say "we need more money". As a single funded organisation that derives its cash from the political party of the day it will always have those in opposition crying about money and ignoring efficiency and vice versa

[Soldier Boy]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

Or its incredibly badly run. Seems that everyone is happy to give the NHS a pass on scrutiny and efficiency and just say "we need more money". As a single funded organisation that derives its cash from the political party of the day it will always have those in opposition crying about money and ignoring efficiency and vice versa

It's both badly run and under-funded. UK health services are dangerously understaffed because of poor pay and working conditions, no matter how hard people want to pretend that's not the case.

[Soldier Boy]

Do you know what you get when you give a workforce poor pay and working conditions? Increasing numbers of staff who don't care about poor pay and working conditions. And staff who don't care about poor pay and poor working conditions for staff also don't care about the safety and well-being of their patients. And that's if they're not the ones carrying out the assaults. Pay dog wages and get dogs for staff, it's that simple.

[LeatherTrumpet]

Originally Posted by Soldier Boy

Do you know what you get when you give a workforce poor pay and working conditions? Increasing numbers of staff who don't care about poor pay and working conditions. And staff who don't care about poor pay and poor working conditions for staff also don't care about the safety and well-being of their patients. And that's if they're not the ones carrying out the assaults. Pay dog wages and get dogs for staff, it's that simple.

A Scottish nurse gets £28,188 per year

is that not enough to care about patients and rapes?

[Cherie]

Gang rapes would suggest they are not just randomers off the street, but organised on site?

[Soldier Boy]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

A Scottish nurse gets £28,188 per year

is that not enough to care about patients and rapes?

It's not enough for them to continue being nurses. The good staff are leaving or retiring. The best people are not being attracted to the role in the first place. There's a huge gulf in nursing (and medical) staff numbers and it's only continuing to grow. That gaping hole is being plastered over with low-skilled, low-training, high-turnover labor and imported staff. Patient safety is suffering and it's only going to get worse -- this article is a stark example of that, and yet people's response is "BAH pay them even less!".

I'd also point out that Scottish nurses got a 12% - 18% pay deal and are therefore now (from 2023) paid a fair chunk above the UK average, with English nurses only getting (and rejecting) a 5% offer.

[Livia]

How much do they need to be paid to give a **** about people being sexually assaulted?

[Soldier Boy]

Originally Posted by Livia

How much do they need to be paid to give a **** about people being sexually assaulted?

They need to be there.

Am I talking to a wall?

They're under-paying, staff conditions are terrible, trained and professionally registered staff are leaving entirely and are not being replaced, because the job is not attractive. They're being replaced by cheap, unregistered, or imported labour and there is not enough medically trained, professionally registered caring staff to regulate anything that's going on in hospitals or in wards. And it's getting worse. Patient safety suffers when staff are underpaid and undertrained. The research has been done, the mechanism is well understood, the government isn't doing anything about it. So patient safety will continue to degrade, patients will be assaulted, go untreated, and die in increasing numbers. That's just the current state of the health service. It is what it is.

[LeatherTrumpet]

According to this article its beds that are the real issue:

The real reason for the NHS crisis

https://www.ft.com/content/2ee16591-...3-3ec6db66cf48

[Niamh.]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

According to this article its beds that are the real issue:

The real reason for the NHS crisis

https://www.ft.com/content/2ee16591-...3-3ec6db66cf48

That article is behind a paywall

[LeatherTrumpet]

Originally Posted by Niamh.

That article is behind a paywall

NHS staff are some of the most brilliant, selfless, heroic people on this planet. They work under unimaginable pressure to achieve miracles, and are often paid far too little for their efforts. It is absolutely right that the government continues to increase funding and the workforce, especially as we live with an increasingly ageing and ailing population.

But hiring more frontline medical staff and increasing the NHS’s budget for day-to-day spending is not going to alleviate the current crisis in emergency care, or bring about a sudden reversal in the ballooning waiting list. That is because these crises are not caused by a staff shortage, they’re caused by a bed shortage.

If you put another fully equipped ambulance out on the road, you’ll be able to get out to one extra person, but if you haven’t freed up an extra bed, the patient is just going to have to join a now even longer queue outside A&E.



Don’t just take my word for it. Compared with the eve of the pandemic, the NHS is now spending 11 per cent more on day-to-day activities in real terms. And despite*record numbers of voluntary resignations, the NHS has 12 per cent more hospital doctors and ambulance staff and 8 per cent more nurses. Yet today it is treating 12 per cent fewer patients from the waiting list than it was in 2019 and admitting 14 per cent fewer emergency patients. Virtually every measure of activity is down (though new cancer appointments are a heartening exception).

These are the striking findings of a study by Max Warner and Ben Zaranko at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which underscores the extent to which this crisis is a beds crisis — and an infrastructure crisis more broadly — rather than a staffing and day-to-day resource crisis.

By my calculations, the only indicator of NHS capacity that has tightened over the same time period is the number of beds available for new non-Covid patients.

Nominally, there are almost exactly the same number of staffed beds in English hospitals today as there were in December 2019. But this is not true in any practical sense. Almost three years into the pandemic there are still about 2,000 hospital beds in use by patients with severe Covid who would otherwise not be there. And far more significantly, there are almost 14,000 beds occupied by patients who no longer need to be in hospital. More than double the total spare capacity currently available for admitting emergency patients are just sitting idle.



And why are we not seeing this near collapse in country after country? Because the British government has underinvested in infrastructure for the best part of two decades. The UK’s overall health spending is not dissimilar to peer countries, but its capital investment is anaemic. Going into the pandemic, Britain had fewer beds per head than virtually any other developed country. One of the few country’s running a similar lean operation — Canada — has also suffered the ignominy of a midsummer ambulance crisis.

Without the ability to conjure thousands of beds out of thin air, solving the delayed discharge problem — and reducing the amount of time people need to spend in hospital more broadly — is the single thing that will rescue the NHS from this perma-winter.



The instinct here is to lay the blame solely on the underfunding of social care, but there are far lower-hanging fruit. Record-keeping systems are so outdated that many English hospitals do not know how many staffed intensive care beds they have, making the planning of efficient transfer of patients in and out of beds a non-starter — and the NHS already has case studies to point to for digital transitions speeding up patient flow.

I don’t expect us to clap for software platforms anytime soon, but if we as a country care about empowering our frontline medics to do what they do best, and relieving the unbearable stresses brought about in no small part by having to operate with antiquated infrastructure, then we need to move the conversation beyond “more cash and more doctors”.

[Soldier Boy]

You're aware that "beds" doesn't mean literal, physical ... beds ... right?

"Beds" means number of beds available and staffed by appropriate staff. This is also why "more doctors and nurses" is meaningless - hiring 20 brand new gen-med nurses is utterly useless when you're down 5 trained ICU or oncology nurses. You can have those 20 staff and you're still going to be down 5 ICU beds. It doesn't mean that the literal beds are not there, it means there's no properly trained staff to man them and make them "active beds".

There are entire wards full of "beds" sat empty in hospitals up and down the country because.

*ahem*

The properly trained and educated specialist staff have been replaced by cheap, under-paid, under-trained, imported labour that isn't qualified to staff those beds.

[Oliver_W]

ToyBoy, you keep talking about "imported labour", that sounds like an alt-right extremist far right dog whistle to me