The National Health Service in the United Kingdom is a paragon of efficiency in the allocation of healthcare services…right?
By Antony Sammeroff
The NHS budget has doubled in real terms over the last 20 years but waiting lists are longer than ever! A shocking 4 million people languish for hospital treatment and at current trends this number is set to rise to 5 million in 2019 unless we do something to reverse them.
The truth is we do not have universal healthcare in the UK but rationing. In Britain more than one million people are waiting to be admitted to hospitals at any one time. 25% of British cardiac patients die waiting for treatment, delays in treatment for colon and lung cancer patients have been so long that 20% of the cases were incurable by the time they finally received care. The elderly simply are not given access to particular services – period. We also do not have equality of access among rich and poor as many people would like to think. The Guardian revealed that the more socially deprived an area the worse the quality and access to care on the NHS is likely to be.
Profligate waste and severe inefficiencies within the system which cost not only the tax-payer, but human lives. Data from the government shows that a stay in an NHS hospital costs around £400 per day, whereas a typical private hospital stay is almost a third cheaper at around £275 per night. In 2014 an NHS efficiency league table revealed that some hospitals that were spending eight times as much as others to buy the same items – sometimes at an expense of up to £600,000 a year. Correcting this could save £1 billion across a £14 billion budget.
UK wide 5.2 million citizens a year visit their GPs with blocked noses, and tens of thousands suffering from other ailments like dandruff or travel sickness. These appointments put pressure on capacities, leading more people to turn up to A&E because they can’t see their family doctor. As a consequence 3.7m A&E visits a year are for similar concerns including sprains, flus, colics and insect bites. Altogether these appointments cost the NHS £2bn a year while resources are drained from the elderly and those with chronic conditions. These problems could be resolved by allowing doctors surgeries, clinics and hospitals to train and certify their own assistants to take responsibilities off the hands of highly specialised staff. Fully fledged professionals will be able to focus their time and attention on what they alone are capable of, while a new variety of specialist will emerge to deal with comparatively minor health issues. Lower-skilled, lower-cost staff will gain critical skills and experience which will afford them a leg-up if they decide to train as GPs in their own right.
Other reports demonstrated that 51 million free GP appointments could have been completely avoided if patients sought help from the correct parts of the National Health Service they were signposted to. MP Jesse Norman suggested this number could be reduced, and savings could be made, if the NHS were to issue a yearly statement to each user indicating where cheaper treatment options were available and how much this would have saved to propagate the knowledge of how to keep the cost of providing services down.
• Every year thousands of perfectly bright and capable prospective medical students are turned away from our universities due to a lack of capacity. At the same time, we have seen major staff shortages across the NHS resulting in existing employees working long hours under stressful conditions.
• Despite its many considerable flaws, the best medical innovations and technology in the world are coming out of America’s private system of healthcare, and all countries with socialised services are benefitting from those innovations including our own.
Save in a document in case you ever get in a debate so you can copy and paste. Antony.