Jim Lahey wrote: Thu Jul 06, 2023 6:33 am
How many more years does the NHS have left, in its current form?
An utter shitshow. I've been waiting 3 years for an op on my shoulder (no sign of getting a date yet), which unfortunately got wrecked before I signed up for private healthcare.
I feel your pain but changing how it's funded isn't going to change how it works unless everyone decides they are willing to pay lots more money to bring it up to the same staffing and equipment levels as comparable healthcare systems. Even with lots more cash I am not entirely sure where all the doctors and nurses etc will suddenly appear from - 9 years to train a medical graduate to become a orthopaedic surgeon! It will take about 10-15 years to get the NHS back to where it was on 2010.
Recent Kings Fund research has shown that funding models are not the key determinant of how good a health system is.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publicatio ... -countries. Indeed the funding of healthcare via central taxation is seen as a very cost effective model for funding healthcare. Please don't mix up the funding model debate with the deliberate chronic underfunding of the NHS by the Tories over the last 13 years, the UK still gets a bigger bang for its buck than most other countries, its just that we dont have enough bucks invested.
However until we have comparable numbers of doctors, nurses, beds, imaging equipment, etc in the UK then we will always have waiting times - they are the consequence of under funding and how too much demand for available supply is 'managed'.
https://www.health.org.uk/chart/chart-h ... pital-beds
If folk think that changing the NHS funding model will produce better results then they are sadly deluded unless they are happy to pay lots more for healthcare and grow the numbers of doctors, nurses, etc and increase numbers of beds, ICU beds, theatre capacity, imaging capacity, etc. Those that do have lots of money have probably decided to get private healthcare whilst trying desperately hard to reduce the amount of tax they pay and will fight the proposal to tax share dividends as earnings!