"I can say my techniques are very advanced … I bet I put more implants and do more bone grafting and surgeries every week than any dentist you know in England. A good dentist is about practice and hand skills and experience. I work hard, very hard, because more and more patients are arriving to my clinic, because in England they don’t find dentists."
The collapse in NHS dentistry and the Turkish dentists filling the gap.
For those of us worried about the creeping #privatisation of the #NHS, this Corporate Watch timeline sets out the long-term political project that underlies the current #Tory engineered #NHScrisis.
A great resource for those of you arguing the privileging of private resources in health care is not a recent development - the campaign against public health care in the UK has a long, and worryingly bipartisan, history!
“Sometimes when you explain that their wait is because we’ve got lots of critically unwell patients, the person will come back to you and say, ‘I don’t care about anybody else.’ That’s really hard to take.”
Anna Quigley (Ipsos, a polling organisation) on current public opinion on the #NHS, as the 'Junior' #Doctors latest strike starts:
'We know the public are worried about the future of the NHS... they want to ensure that the NHS is there for them & their family when they need it in the future"!
#Tory defunding & a multifaceted #NHScrisis have put that at very real risk!
But, the Q. is #WesStreeting a safe pair of hands? Or are #Labour's 'reforms' just as damaging?
Beyond the record waiting lists for #NHS care, there would seem to be 'hidden' waiting lists to get onto waiting lists.... I have certainly experienced this with my wife's #neurology appointments (or lack thereof) and so it comes as little surprise that this problem is widespread.
This is a classic distortion produced by a focus on targets.
The #NHScrisis continues to worsen while NHS staff are pressured into hiding its true extent.
more detail on the #Tory wrecking of the #NHS.... by cutting in real terms funding for sexual health clinics by a third since 2013, those with what were clinic-treatable conditions are ending up in hospital with worsening sexual health.
So a cut in one area, forces more people into the hospital bottle-neck, raising demand on limited capacity & compounded (again) other aspects of the #NHScrisis.
The extent of #Tories attack on the NHS is ever clearer!
The #NHScrisis takes many forms... and #toxic management & staff relations is one (more).
In a defunded, stressed #healthservice, with staff burning out & over-worked (due to unfilled jobs), we can expect inter-personal relations to become strained (to say the least).
In this case, a #female#doctor was driven to take her own life, triggered by a delay in removing herself from a toxic work environment.
Whatever the local issues, behind this is (still) #tory wrecking!
I like this letter in today's Guardian; it turns round what I would usually say about #vets; that they are an illustration of how expensive #healthcare is if its provisions is entirely privatised.
Rather Anne Cowper uses the experience of her #cat's treatment as a way of showing how great the #NHS could be if it was fully (and properly) funded.
Its a great rhetorical point, and although my warning still stands, she rightly puts the argument the other way (too)!
The latest #Tory wheeze is to pay dentists £50 for each new NHS patient they sign up - benefitting around a million patents.
The response from Shawn Charlwood, (British Dental Association) accused ministers of “rearranging the deckchairs”.
He went on to say 'This recovery plan is not worthy of the title. It won’t halt the exodus from the workforce or offer hope to millions struggling to access care'!
Meanwhile in #Lancashire, if we thought we were having trouble getting a #doctors appointment right now, given over half of the county's GP practices are worried they may have to close (due to budgetary problems) in the next two years.... things may be about to get a lot worse.
Work is beyond crazy. I was back today after 12 days off only to find that there were 670 email prescription requests (the oldest from Friday) and all the paper requests from Monday and Tuesday. The phone didn't stop ringing, so two of us managed to get 120 of the electronic ones sent to the GPs to sign. By tomorrow there will be another 100.
We haven't enough staff to process them and not enough doctors to sign them. #NHSCrisis#GPCrisis
I read that gonorrhoea & syphilis is on the rise, as is measles (after low uptake of the MMR vaccine), there are shortages of key motor neurone disease drugs & that's just one page of the Guardian.
The #Tories have engineered a growing system of rationing good health, where those who can buy their way out of the failures of #publichealth can, and the rest be damned.
The lack of coherent #workforce strategy for the #NHS, leading to a reliance on temporary staff & overtime payments (for already stretched staff) has led to a massive £10bn a year bill.... money which might have been better spent paying #Nurses & #Doctors better & improving their working conditions to encourage more new #workers into #healthcare.
More evidence the #Tories plan to push people into the arms of private #healthcare through an engineered #NHScrisis:
FT reports that:
'The percentage of people in the UK aged 18 to 64 with personal [health] cover jumped from 17% in March 2022 to 26% in September last year, while those taking out cover through company schemes rose from 21% to 28% over the same period'!
As they say follow the money; and the money is flowing into health insurance.
More evidence that over a decade of #Tory rule has been bad for our #health, as life expectancy after rising (through a momentum effect) at the start of the current Tory period has now fallen back to levels at the start, reversing the (momentum) gain & now falling.
Of course this reflects #austerity linked health issues, the engineered #NHScrisis as well as health problems resulting from #inequality, #poverty & economic insecurity.
If you wanted an index on how out-of-touch (or conversely unconcerned ) he is with the plight of the general population this would be it.
The #housingcrisis, the #NHScrisis, the problem(s) of #inequality & other social disruptions will not be solved by more austerity & tax cuts... rather, they will me made worse & #voters know this...
A quick reminder of the central theme of my previous posts on the #NHScrisis & #doctors strikes.
Don't believe the #Tories or the right wing press.... the Doctors have been backed into a corner & feel they have little alternative to industrial action.
The Tories have engineered this (as part of a larger NHS crisis), so if you are caught up in the upheaval please do not blame the hardworking & overstretched NHS staff & doctors...
And, yet another aspect of the #NHScrisis; violence towards #nurses.
'... people are losing a little bit of confidence in the NHS. The average person just comes in with a little bit more heightened sense of concern & that can easily flip. If you’re waiting 13-14 hours for an A&E bed and your elderly mother is still stuck on a trolley who wouldn’t be frustrated? It’s absolutely shocking'!
And so now the #NHScrisis in all it dimensions lies behind another health scare: this time the surge in #scabies across the country.
Lets be clear; you cannot defund the #NHS, attack & demean in staff while engineering the environment for failure (to push #patients into the arms of private #healthcare) and not thinks you will see a series of crises in public health.
Where the #Tories always go wrong is thinking they can buy their & their chums way out of danger!
If the data is correct & around two thirds of #doctors are experiencing significant levels of stress & distress due to their inability to deliver proper #healthcare due to the #Tories engineered #NHScrisis, then I think its sage to say we will see continuing losses of staff from frontline health services.
If you think this attack on clinicians #mentalhealth is an accident, you've not being paying attention to the wreckers' game plan for the NHS - wreck then privatise!
In the market for 'free-from' food profiteering #food retailers meet the #NHScrisis (in a postcode lottery for prescriptions for medically necessary diets) and the wider #healthcrisis....
given 'free-from' foods seems to be often over a quarter more expensive than their 'normal' equivalents, it looks like those with allergies are being exploited by suppliers who know they have a relatively (health-defined) captive market...
#Doctors have started a three-day walk-out today, in their ongoing dispute over pay.
Initial hopes that #VictoriaAtkins might bring calm & sense where #SteveBarclay has merely inflamed the dispute have now been dashed... so, we're back with a dispute that will certainly worsen (in the sort term) the #NHScrisis.
Biut as always, lets be clear; this is not 'junior' Doctors fault, they have been backed into a corner by a #Tory govt. who have been defunding the NHS to engineer this very crisis!
Wes Streeting's claim that #NHS manages 'use' winter crises to claim more resource, suggests the #LabourParty, as many have suspected, may not be the panacea that the #NHScrisis requires.
While Streeting is right that funding is not the only issue that impacts on the efficacy of UK #healthcare, making out NHS leaders to be cynical money grabbers is not they way to get staff on side for the reforms he may think necessary... its not a good start to the reform process
Why #Tory claims for record funding of the #NHS are so much hogwash in one chart!
Focussing on nominal cash budgets (wilfully) misses the impact of inflation on real #healthcare spending.
If you wonder how much of the #NHScrisis is due to 'defunding' (which is to say budgets failing to keep up with #inflation) then the gap in this chart is (part of) the answer!
And of course a 20% real terms budget increase has had to include a range of expenditures (from Covid to necessary wage rises)