He will add that this means moving more care from hospitals to the community, a shift from treatment to prevention and switching from analogue to digital services.
Prevention doesn’t actually save money. Because something catches up with us anyway. Which is where most of he expense isx, that lsat 6 months. The variable in health costs tends to be how many years of healthcare do you get before that lsat 6 months.
Yes, yes, this is tendency, not a certainty. But it’s as with baccy, booze and burgers saving the NHS cash because early deaths. On average that’s true.
Now, obviously, prevention has large private benefits that accrue to the patient. But it’s not a cure for the finances of the NHS.
Leaving aside the usual 24 hours to save our NHS bollocks and political hype, there’s a lot of sense in those proposals.
Individual monitoring of reaction to drugs, monitoring gate of stroke victims or the elderly, monitoring diabetics, monitoring cancer patient response to treatments etc are all useful things to do in and of themselves, even if they don’t save money in the long run.
The aim of a healthcare system is, after all, to improve the lives of sick individuals and these go some way to providing better care and treatment and improving lives.
This isn’t about reforming the NHS, it’s about reforming the population so the premise is basically dishonest.
Also, putting obese people on weight-loss drugs whose effectiveness ceases when the drugs are withdrawn and where some side-effects are already known and others lurk in the undergrowth waiting to be discovered is to overstate the benefits and ignore the costs.
It’s only by ignoring the reality of the country’s experience with Pfizer, Moderna and AZ that a tie-in with Eli Lilly can be contemplated.
And once all that data is being produced what other uses will it be put to?
“You haven’t done your steps today, comrade. No bread for you!”
In principle I’m in favour of home monitoring of vital signs, for a reason that may have escaped the cherub Streeting and the rest of TTK’s coven: it reintroduces individual responsibility and self-reliance. This goes directly against the grain of collectivism.
Since joining Dicky Heart & The Seizures a few years ago I’ve had a watch that does HR and ECGs, a blood pressure monitor, a smart scale, and done the Zoe thing with the glucose monitor. All of this built up the body of evidence that I used finally to bludgeon Bart’s into giving me a second heart op, which worked, and I’m now symptom-free and back to normal.
Here’s the thing, though. If you’re a greedy fat cunt and suffer the consequent metabolic illnesses, including the mental elf, anxiety and low self-esteem, you’re given money and resources, and excused being productive. But you’re also too fat and crippled to do much. Are people really so lazy that they’d do this to themselves and so limit their potential enjoyment of their YOLO lives? Revealed preferences, eh?
I should add, of course, that being a greedy fat cunt doesn’t stop Murphy from churning out his shit, which no doubt he does sitting down, but I would hesitate to call that “productive”, a word with positive connotations.
I just booked a Doctors appointment in three and a half weeks time. First one available. Envy of the world etc.
“this means moving more care from hospitals to the community, a shift from treatment to prevention and switching from analogue to digital services.”
Three cliches that have been attempted and attempted over the decades, largely fruitlessly. In other words, essentially bollocks.
None of them remotely address the problem of the poor performance of the real, existing NHS as distinct from the wished-for performance of the Holy NHS.
By the way, is the last point, analogue -> digital, a warning that the crumblies who are not au fait with digital will be abandoned to crumble some more?
The NHS has expensive hospitals, full of expensive equipment, which mostly are used for 35 hours a week. Moving to 24×7 (people don’t get ill to a timetable) would pose obvious problems, in that many more staff would be needed, so couldn’t be achieved overnight, but it ought to be possible under a “10-year plan” as is now being proposed, and would save billions.
Issuing free digital health monitors sounds like smart hypochondria to me.
Not only will this crash the health service, there won’t be a single person in the country not off sick.
Indeed Paul. Those not seeking medical attention because their digital health monitor is suggesting they do will be claiming their digital health monitor has malfunctioned & is not detecting their symptoms. So likely sum to 100%
Repatriate every illegal, overstayer or auslander on benefits for more than a year. Then provide better care for, what, ten million fewer people.
Did I mention that I’ve spent three years getting treatments and referrals by a doctor I’ve never met?
@Martin by the M25 – Maybe if you told them you were an ardent Hamas supporter they would expedite your appointment?
Allegedly works for gobby Labour MP’s.
The NHS has expensive hospitals, full of expensive equipment, which mostly are used for 35 hours a week. Moving to 24×7 (people don’t get ill to a timetable) would pose obvious problems, in that many more staff would be needed, so couldn’t be achieved overnight, but it ought to be possible under a “10-year plan” as is now being proposed, and would save billions.
I’ve had private treatment in an NHS hospital twice. The first was done in the evenings over 6 weeks and each appointment was after 7pm the second on a Saturday morning.
Probably NHS staff earning extra on the side, but at least in both cases some very expensive machinery was being used outside normal working hours.
I also recently had a scan on a Saturday afternoon and that was NHS.
Sure, but implementation of a 2 shift system (moving the current slackers hours earlier) wouldn’t be beyond the whit of man.
06:00 hrs – 14:00 hrs and 14:00 hrs – 22:00 hrs
Bit of flexibility around lunchtimes and shift handovers if that is necessary.
That would be a reasonable solution in the private sector, so the only reason it wouldn’t work in the NHS is the unions would never allow it.
…are used for 35 hours a week. Moving to 24×7 … many more staff would be needed
Any where would you get that staff from? The only way to increase the number of people working in X is to *DECREASE* the number of people working in not-X.
As our host has said, the creation of the NHS was only possible with the utter destruction of agrigultural employment. If you have 60 million people scraping a living out of the ground, you don’t have any people to do healthcare. The only way you can increase the number of healthcare staff is to remove them from doing-things-other-than-healthcare. So, come on. What are you going to slash and eliminate to liberate the bodies to staff the NHS?
“IMMIGRANTS!”
Ok, steal people from other countries’ health services. Let’s put to one side how PISSED OFF other countries are with us taking all their healthcare staff, the numbers don’t work.
Imaging a country that only has two occupations, healthcare and teaching. It has a population of 200, with 100 health and 100 teachers.
“We need more healthcare staff”
Ok, so 100 doctors aren’t enough for 200 people. Ok, fire half the teachers, make them into doctors.
“No! We need those teachers. IMMIGRANTS!!!!”
Ok, we import 100 immigrants and make them into doctors. So we’ve now got 200 doctors, enough for that population of 200 people. Hold on, we’ve now got 300 people, we don’t have enough doctors.
“IMPORT IMMIGRANTS!!!!!”
Ok, import another 100 doctors. Wonderful, we’ve got enough doctors for that population of 300. Oh dear, but we now have 400 people to treat.
“MOAR!!! IMMIGRANTS!!!!!!!!”
Ok, we now have enough for 400, but we now have a population of 500….
See where we’re going? At some point we will hit the buffers when we have the entire global population of 9 billion working for the NHS AND IT STILL WON’T BE ENOUGH.
The health service Absolutely. Must. do more with less. Or even just the same with less. There is NO other way for reality to function.
Meanwhile…
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/20/drag-bingo-rainbow-fudge-pronoun-badges-taxpayers-foot-bill/
Go on, Tim. Have at it.
BiND,
I think health monitoring is worth a shot if they can do it cheap enough and find a good use. A Fitbit or equivalent is very cheap tech compared to people’s time.
It’s the community health thing I would bin. Have people just go to a unit at the hospital, full of doctors who know ears and arseholes and you go straight to a specialist. Same as how you go to a dentist or optician. I think GPs are mostly a waste of money and a lot of general care stuff for old people would be just as well done with a couple of nurses.
And in general privatise as much as possible. People here talking about the use of equipment. I would mention some of the ridiculous eco costs, like new roofs made of solar that will take over 50 years to get a return on investment. In other words, they’ll never repay the investment.
John Galt,
“That would be a reasonable solution in the private sector, so the only reason it wouldn’t work in the NHS is the unions would never allow it.”
The unions would. Pay some overtime etc.
How many managers at a trust give a shit? Very few of them. They think up “run more shifts” now they have to do a load of work. And what do they get for their initiative? Fuck all.