Although I believe that every citizen of a nation should be able to access healthcare when they need it, I’m increasingly convinced that the NHS model is not the way to provide it. Having seen members of my family get half hearted, piss poor or occasionally lethal or potentially lethal treatment by the NHS, I’ve seen just how bad it is.
One problem with the NHS is it does the occasional thing, such as transplant surgery and trauma surgery very well indeed, but there are vast areas of the NHS that perform pretty badly when compared to other healthcare systems. Cancer treatment outcomes for example are less good when compared to countries like the USA where, for those who can afford it, treatment outcomes seem to be better than that of the UK. Other areas such as health screening also seem to be a bit hit and miss with long waits for appointments when they are needed.
However there is one area of the NHS that excels in its uselessness and that is mental health provision. It is truly awful. Even if a person, such as someone who experiences a life changing psychological trauma can get to see a mental health specialist which is often very doubtful, there are exceedingly long waits, the non medical interventions such as counselling are hard to get hold of and only given for a limited time. Most of the time a person approaching their GP surgery about a mental health issue will be fobbed off with SSRI medication. Now I’m not saying that SSRI’s are not useful, for some they are, but for others they are not, they have distressing side effects such as suppressing emotions and patients on these drugs should be more closely monitored than they are.
Britain has few places in mental health hospitals now due to a long standing change in policy that favours managing mental conditions in the community. I agree that for many having their conditions managed in the community might be what’s best for them but for others it isn’t. Some people might benefit from a short stay in a mental hospital even if just to stabilise their condition and take them away from whatever in the outside world might be triggering their mental disturbance, but for these people there are no mental hospital places available. For all too many people the only way that they get into a mental health hospital is if their behaviour becomes so bizarre that they come to the attention of the police and get sectioned or involuntarily incarcerated in a hospital.
Britain’s NHS mental health services are truly appalling. They are never there when people really need them because they are overstretched and can’t cope with the numbers of people who need to access decent mental health services. If you are lucky you might be seen and treated, for a short time then to all intents and purposes you are left on your own. If you are unlucky then you might spiral into illness and probably end up as one of the growing number of suicides that afflict the nation. We have an epidemic of suicide at present with over 6500 occurring in 2018 along and three quarters of those suicides are men with rising numbers of suicides in the under 30 age group.
The reason for me writing about the appalling state of NHS mental health services is because the NHS’s piss poor treatment of mentally ill or mentally disturbed people has come to light in connection to the terrible Plymouth shooting incident. The perpetrator of this incident in which five innocent people died, had mental conditions that his family had noticed but about which the NHS had done absolutely sod all.
According to press reports the family of the perpetrator had begged the NHS to give some mental health help to the gunman prior to the killings, in which the gunman also committed suicide, but were rebuffed. One of the gunman’s victims, his mother, had seen her son’s decline into madness and recognised the seriousness of his condition. She approached the NHS on what sounds like numerous occasions and even attempted to get the police to keep an eye on him so concerned was she about his mental condition. However the NHS did sod all. What mental health help he did get was provided by an independent organisation and although independent organisations including mental health charities, can be very good, they are no substitute for a proper mental health service. Whilst there are people whom the mental health charities can help, they are not resourced or equipped to deal with those whose mental conditions are devastating and serious. Such people should be treated by the main healthcare system that we all pay for but sadly they are not. They are too often left to rot until their conditions resolve themselves through suicide or as appears to be the case with the Plymouth killer, their illness explodes into a tragic murder suicide incident.
Whilst the primary responsibility for the murders in Plymouth lies with the killer himself, there was another finger on the trigger and that belongs to the NHS. The NHS turned away the family of the killer who could see that he was descending into crisis. The NHS made the excuse that they were ‘short staffed’ and refused to help.
I do not and cannot excuse the terrible murders that have scarred Plymouth, but I do wonder if they could have been averted had the NHS done what we all bloody pay them for and treated the killer for his mental health conditions before he went apeshit and killed? Maybe if help had been available and been provided he might have had the change of scene and the intensive treatment that a mental health hospital might have given him he would not have gone the way he did? What’s truly appalling about the NHS’s involvement in this case is that they do not seem to have even bothered to properly help him in the community, they just did appeared to do the bare minimum necessary to tick the right boxes in order to satisfy the NHS’s sclerotic bureaucracy.
What I find seriously galling about the NHS is that they cry that they are short staffed in vital areas like mental health but seem to be able to find masses amounts of public money for unnecessary rubbish like ‘diversity and inclusion’ managers and staff. For the £35k to £50k cost of just one of these many dozens of lower level diversity wasters, the NHS could have employed a mental health professional that might have diverted the Plymouth killer away from his headlong dive into horror and madness.
The NHS has priorities, but they are not good ones. Spending money on worthless shit like diversity and inclusion staff whilst worthwhile sectors such as the mental health services whither on the vine due to lack of funds, shows that the NHS has messed up priorities. The NHS is not ‘our’ NHS, it’s an NHS for the middle class left and their obsessions with diversity and is completely unfit for the purpose of providing quality healthcare to the nation. We need something better than the NHS, Britons deserve something better than the NHS. No other nation has directly copied the NHS healthcare model and those of us who have seen the NHS at its worst, completely understand why this is the case. This is because the NHS model provides the worst outcomes for the greatest number of people, is inefficient, is slovenly and wasteful in its management and is often completely unresponsive to medical needs.
Will I clap for the NHS when asked. Of course I bloody will not. I know too much about how bad the NHS really is to engage in such mindless propaganda for a failed and sometimes lethal healthcare system.
Let’s also look at the activities, or rather, the non activity of the Police, who have effectively abandoned the streets, knelt down to the fascist-left BLM & as we speak are kissing the prophet’s arse.
Instead, they are trawling Twitter and Facebook for hurty-words, going after soft targets who won’t riot or call them waaaycist or phobic giving the illusion of activity while massaging otherwise lamentable clear-up rates and non-existent response and attendance rates.
These are the same police, who despite numerous warnings, also the perpetrator’s previous arrest for assault, gave him his gun and licence back.
I am not anti-gun, far from it, we have been disarmed and left to the mercy of armed criminals who don’t give a flying fourex for the law, which is why they’re criminals, and the criminally indifferent increasingly tooled-up contemptful police.
I’d like to think that heads will roll for this, but sadly the evidence of previous “regrettable incidents” don’t give me any hope.
We’ll get the inevitable “lessons must be learned” from the chief plod, the politicised usually leftist PCC and of course various politicians who will as always, invoke “protection the preshhhhhuuuss chiiiiildren who are our future” and as usual will call for more “gun control” rather than address the piss-poor excuses for policing, mental health provision and the knowledge-lite discipline-free I-know-my-rights, “evereeeee-chuyuld-is-preshhhuss”, Marxist infested daytime crowd-control units posing as schools, and the Stalinist hothouses that are our Univershitty Halls of Knackerdemia.
Lastly, is the “online culture” massively amplified by the isolation of the wholly pointless lockdowns that have tipped so many over the edge. It’s instructive that as with so many of these unfortunate inadequates, that they are “avid gamers” where the realism of the games gets increasingly mixed up with the reality they no longer see outside their doors.
Worryingly, I see no end to this as the authorities retreat into authoritarianism against ordinary plebs, ever more highly paid, uncaring, box-ticking, functionaries on the tax-teat while anything demanding a real service gets the bum’s rush due to a “lack of resources”, a prime case in point being the BBC pleading poverty while fleecing the over-75 for the TV tax, despite paying combined salaries for the top ten “presenters” plus “diversity advisor” June Sarpong, the equivalent of nearly 43,000 licence fees.
Will anything change? Nope, as long as the football is on, plenty of gambling & the beer isn’t too dear. Hopefully the warcon our central heating will be the final straw when we say, ENOUGH.
Here endeth the rant.
I do believe that you are correct in your criticisms of the police. They’ve too often abandoned the jobs they should be doing for bollocks like siting on Twitter looking for something that a Mohammedan or a trans type or anyone else who can avail themselves of the Orwellian sounding ‘protected characteristics’ would be offended by.
The police sound like they’ve really screwed up with regards the Plymouth killer. His family had contacted the police as well as the useless NHS regarding his behaviour and the police gave him back his gun licence and gun. The police must have known that this guy was a person of concern as they’d been told so by the man’s family. Sadly I agree with you that the police will probably worm their way out of taking responsibility for their actions in this case just as they’ve managed to worm their way out of responsibility for a whole host of other problems, up to and including the ongoing scandal of Islamic Rape Gangs.
I believe that the jury is out with regards lockdowns, some credit them with buying time before a vaccine that can either protect from infection or reduce symptoms was available. I do believe that we need a Royal Commission on covid to find out what went wrong, what went right and what agencies, such as Public Health England, failed dismally to either protect or prepare for a novel virus. We also need definitive proof either way as to the effectiveness of lockdowns.
Although some may question whether or not lockdowns have caused or exacerbated mental health issues, I have little doubt that for some, being cooped up at home and shackled to the internet and maybe falling into echo chambers the experience of lockdown has not been good. The Plymouth shooter appears to have been enamoured by the Q Anon cult and might have been dragged further into it than he may have been had he not been so isolated. I’ve noticed that the lunatic Q Anon cult has appeared to grow during lockdown as people are sat at home and away from those who might challenge the ideas of the Q cult. If you sit in an echo chamber, whether it be political, religious or cultic, then it’s unlikely that the particular echo chamber will make a person more moderate. Echo chambers make people worse.
Part of the problem with getting people to recognise how bad the NHS is is that bits of it are very good. My general healthcare requirements are covered by the Eastgate Medical Centre in Hornsea, East Yorkshire. The place is very efficiently run, you can get to see a doctor quickly and easily, they have been monitoring my type two diabetes since 2013 and doing an excellent job.
Other interactions that I have had with the NHS have been less good. But I would describe them as mediocre rather than truly terrible. The problem with such mediocricy is that we seem to have become so used to it that we see it as normal.
My best argument against such acceptance of piss poor service is to cite the quality of healthcare enjoyed by Max. Max doesn’t have access to the NHS. Max has health insurance and gets first class healthcare. Max doesn’t have to deal with waiting lists or mediocre service. Max is a tabby cat. Surely lots of people have pets and can see the contrast between the service that they get from their vet and their own healthcare.
I completely agree there are parts of the NHS that are very good, even though generally the NHS performs badly overall. I and those around me have experienced both mediocre and absolutely appalling treatment from the NHS. However I will agree with you that mediocrity is what most people get from the NHS. Because Britons don’t in general know much different they accept the mediocrity sometimes on the grounds that at least its free and we don’t have the healthcare access issues that the Americans have. We’ve been scared into clinging to a failing and indeed failed NHS for fear of finding something worse. The trouble is it’s not just a binary choice between the free for all of the USA and the sclerotic mediocrity of the NHS, other advanced countries are able to provide universal healthcare without many of the problems that afflict the NHS.
You are right about the vet issue. We would not stand for crap treatment from a vets for our animals but we put up with the sometimes lethal crapness of the NHS with barely a murmur.
Unfortunately the National Health Service has become only a Notional Health Service, or should that be National Excuses Service. I’ve had appointments for assessments, appointments for operations and appointments to see a surgeon or ‘member of the team’ beyond count and each time been fobbed off with increasingly fatuous excuses and, the last time, a downright lie about an incomplete pre-operative assessment. I’m going private.
The NHS is truly appalling now in most areas. As for mental health, people with issues are neglected until something serious happens which results in incarceration (if these people are still alive) and instead of receiving rehabilitation in hospital they are dosed up with meds and just left to exist.
This is the true picture of the ‘caring’ NHS.
It ceased to be a service long ago and is now an institution for the desperate.
The NHS is truly horrible in many sectors. It’s sclerotic, too often incompetent and riddled with waste. We need something better but not the US system, which although gives good outcomes to patients when compared to the UK, is unaffordable to many. We should be looking at how the Germans, French, Israelis, Dutch and Singaporeans manage for examples of how to run a comprehensive healthcare system.