Obese patients and smokers face being sent to the back of the queue for NHS surgery under government plans.
Reforms announced by Sir Keir Starmer will mean that patients will only be given a date for an operation if they have been assessed as “fit to proceed”.
Tens of thousands of patients waiting for hip and knee surgery will be asked to first undergo a 12-week weight-loss programme, while smokers will be urged to quit.
Fatties might not need new knees if they were thinner. Smokers recover badly – or worse – from surgery. So, you know, sensible enough.
Except we all know how this will turn out, don’t we? You’ll not get near a knife if your BMI is even 25.1 and if you’ve even been in a room with an unlit tab.
There is also another issue. People in countries with functional medical systems are thinking “!2 weeks? Wait? For Surgery?”
It’s just a government fudge to reduce waiting lists, then they can point at them and go “look see how the waiting list is down” when they’ve been moved from a “waiting list” to a “patient doing home preparation for surgery” list.
Winners all round! (Except the patients, but who gives a fuck about them)
Meanwhile, last time i needed a small thing taken care of in Britain I was told the wait would be months. Then a whole day in the hospital to have it done.
Then i went to a place in Eastern Europe, appointment went like this.
Doc: “It’s a thing. This needs cutting out”
Me: “Ok. When can we do it?”
Doc: “What are you talking about, get up on the table.”
Me: “Ok.”
Doc: *injecty drugs, slice, snip, cut, doctor things, stitches*
Doc: “Done. Here’s a small, easily affordable bill.”
Me: “Have some cash.”
Doc: “Pleasure doing business with you.”
Me: “Same.”
Obviously a bigger op requires a bit more prep, but the difference is astonishing. Envy of the world my arse. If the NHS behaved more like this, it would be a lot better.
Another example was last time in A&E. Patient needed a IV removing after being rehydrated via drip.
Doctor came and checked patient over, said “All good, now I’ll just get a nurse to take that out and then you can go home.” We then sat there for nearly an hour waiting for a nurse to take it out. Why the effing fuck didn’t the doctor just take it out and we could go home? Too bloody high and mighty to get their hands dirty doing things like actually treat patients.
Burn it down. Salt the ground.
From the OBR:
“Tobacco duties are levied on purchases of cigarettes, hand-rolled tobacco, cigars and other forms of tobacco. In 2024-25 we estimate that tobacco duties will raise £8.8 billion. This represents 0.8 per cent of all receipts and is equivalent to 0.3 per cent of national income, and £302 per household. Duty on cigarettes accounts for the majority of all tobacco duty receipts”.
Seems to me smokers have contributed more than enough to HMG so should tell TTK to fuck off.
Do I detect signs of a bitch fight? Does Streeting, the health Minister and uncloseted gayer, announce what the commies think is good news, or does TTK (description of suspected sexual preference censored to avoid attention being drawn to our host’s site) steal the limelight?
If the UK ever moves to insurance-based healthcare, it would be prudent to incorporate some incentives to look after your health. Any suggestions?
Grist
Q. Apart from both being gayers, what do Wes Streeting and Matthew Parris have in common?
A. They both employed fellow gayer Keir Mather – now the young Labour MP for Selby & Ainsty – as a “researcher”.
Of course, there’s no gay mafia…
Last time I visited GP for a follow up consultation a couple of months ago, I dropped by the surgery to make an appointment.
Receptionist: The doctor is free in 20 minutes if you don’t mind waiting.
Me: Mind? If this was the NHS I’d be lucky if it was 2 weeks before the next appointment.
Receptionist: I have heard about that. It’s disgraceful.
Medical insurance can be a bit pricey in NL, but by God it’s worth it.
Stop it stop it schadenfreude here in the colonies is reaching unbearable levels as the UK’s Dummköpfedämmerung slithers inexorably downward.
Announcing policies that have been in place for donkey’s years as a way of grabbing headlines and deflecting from real problems is why governments are despised. This one is the equivalent of passing laws against an activity that is already illegal to avoid having to take responsibility for not implementing said law.
I knew someone 15+ years ago who was told he couldn’t have a knee op until he lost weight and my brother has been told they won’t even consider putting him on the kidney transplant list until he losses weight.
And smokers have always been urged to quit before having general anaesthetic becuase of the problems with recovery, not withstanding Addolff’s point about how much tax revenue is collected from smokers. (I suppose now we’re well over the Laffer inflection point and revenues are falling as people switch to the black market that point has less salience.).
Any personal action (smoking, overeating, Sunday league soccer, DIY, cycling, running, being a smug twat likely to get a good slapping) that might cause an injury should immediately send you to the back of the queue. Of course everyone does do something likely to injure themselves, so everyone will be sent to the back…
Some of the fatties have got that way while sat waiting 12 months for a mobilising operation.
At least the smokers actually pay a lot more in than they take out, how about a health tax on Sunday league soccer to cover all the ACL injuries?
Another example was last time in A&E. Patient needed a IV removing after being rehydrated via drip.
Doctor came and checked patient over, said “All good, now I’ll just get a nurse to take that out and then you can go home.” We then sat there for nearly an hour waiting for a nurse to take it out. Why the effing fuck didn’t the doctor just take it out and we could go home? Too bloody high and mighty to get their hands dirty doing things like actually treat patients.
I had a similar experience. After a self-inflicted complication following a prostate biopsy I had a blocked bladder and was hospitalised for a couple of nights. On his morning round at around 8am the consultant said the catheter could be removed I could be discharged once I’d passed clear urine 3 times.
It took until 10 am before I could persuade a nurse to remove the catheter and I had passed the urine test, as it were, by 1pm. At 4pm I told them if they didn’t discharge me I would discharge myself. My wife picked me up at 5pm.
You would think that given the shortage of beds, this was March so still in the busy period, they’d have been pushing me out of the door as soon as they could.
And that is in an NHS area I have regularly praised.
Any intervention is performed on the basis that the patient stands to benefit from it. Where you have limited resources, those are prioritised towards maximal overall benefit. So there is nothing new here.
You won’t get on the liver transplant list either if you keep drinking, it’ll go to someone who is less likely to wreck a new one. Though if you need to be on the list and keep drinking you won’t be not on the list for very long anyway.
Thin end of a VERY large wedge.
No matter how smug you might be feeling. No matter how convinced you might be of your righteous entitlement, there WILL always be something available to deny you.
Of course there has to be some form of practical rationing of health (assuming it’s actually about health) services, but if you actually believe that this will be based on the well being of the population………
Chernyy: “. Why the effing fuck didn’t the doctor just take it out and we could go home? Too bloody high and mighty to get their hands dirty doing things like actually treat patients.”
In questions we can answer: That doctor, like the vast majority of them, quite likely wasn’t trained and licensed to handle IV insertions/extractions.
Doing Medical Stuff while Unlicensed is a big no-no… Can get you in serious trouble..
And you really don’t want an amateur to mess with IV needles, even taking them out.. You’re messing with major veins, not one of the relatively easily “replaced” side shunts.
It’s not really a matter of the Doctor being high and mighty, but more a matter of Union/Insurance-driven Hyperspecialisation and Licensing.
What used to be a commonly trained skill amongst doctors and nurses alike 25 years ago, is now divided into 4 or 5 types of License, each with their own training track, to be renewed bi-annually to keep your License.
And that’s just for the ordinary sticking needles in places to inject something.
Whether someone is fit enough to benefit or recover from surgery is an entirely different issue to what category their BMI puts them in, or even how much they smoke and drink.
BMI has it’s uses, as a statistical tool it has certain correlations that can be a useful guide for further investigations in healthcare. But using it as a standalone tool to make decisions is a pseudoscientific application it is not intended for. If you can’t use a tool sensibly and responsibly then you shouldn’t be allowed to use it all.
Besides, these policies include self-defeating logic, if you’re struggling to exercise because your knees or hips are knackered, or you comfort eat because you’re in pain, it’s not helpful to be told the NHS won’t fix your health issue until you first deal with the problems your health issue may be causing.
We already have indigenous Brits at the back of the queue for health care, so it’s no change.
Would a fat illegal immigrant get treatment more quickly than a thin white person?
MJW, you make your points well, but I have my doubts about the possible utility of BMI, ever since the current system appeared, and within hours it was pointed out that it declared obese almost every member of the Home Nations rugby teams…
BMI – as it is used by the NHS and current medical establishment – is dimensionally unsound. Weight is, more or less, proportional to volume not area.
The original BMI was devised as Weight/Height^2.5 because human width was observed to be slightly less than proportional to height. But some lazy individual found that calculating h^2.5 was too much like hard work (looking things up in a log table) and changed the formula to weight/h^2.
So a healthily muscled six-footer will be misdescribed as overweight when he/she/they is not and a similar person who is 5ft 4″ will be categorised as underweight.
As Mark says the problem is it’s very much the thin end of the Wedge.
Yes Smokers and fat people now but it doesn’t take much to expand that to:
– Reform UK supporters or other political opponents based on their Social media output
– Whites
– Men
– Heterosexuals
Does anyone seriously think this government, the worst arguably inhuman history, won’t hesitate to ration care on political rather than health grounds?
Chernyy:
“We then sat there for nearly an hour waiting for a nurse to take it out. Why the effing fuck didn’t the doctor just take it out and we could go home? Too bloody high and mighty to get their hands dirty doing things like actually treat patients.”
Or, since the nurses are unionized, perhaps it’s in their contract.
Chernyy: When I had my NHS throat op, the conversation was along similar lines:
Private ENT consultant doing NHS work: Yep, there’s lump, it needs zapping.
Me: When can I get it done?
PENTC: Werrrll, if you want to have it done in-patient, maybe in three months or so, or every Tuesday I book the whole theatre and do about a dozen patients one after the other, first come first served, chop chop no waiting, no tea, no sympathy.
Me: Book me in!
A bit over a week later, my bus happened to get me there at ten to eight, so I ended up the first on the conveyor belt. Woke up at eleven, a couple of glasses of body-temperature water, examined by a post op-nurse, and was ready to leave by twelve, with a bag of £2500-worth of drugs
“My” chap sees the mess in the NHS from the inside, and does what he can to step over it working one day a week, knowing if they complain he can just bugger off back to 5-days-a-week private practice.
@Van Patten
“Does anyone seriously think this government, the worst arguably inhuman history, won’t hesitate to ration care on political rather than health grounds?”
If you’re white and British, they already are!
People in countries with functional medical systems are thinking “12 weeks? Wait? For Surgery?”
If only, NHS hip ops are currently at least 18 months waiting in severe pain. A mate has just booked to go private at ~£20k (I did suggest the HU option, but he wasn’t keen.) Waiting period = a few weeks.
People in countries with functional medical systems are thinking “12 weeks? Wait? For Surgery?”
You were lucky.
Nearly four years for a hernia, which I had to cancel twice because AF. Now AF is largely fixed, I’m at the back of the queue again. Fortunately it rarely bothers me but it won’t get better by itself and I need to get it done before I run out of QUALYS.
I see the same old urge to dick about with something that works is still there in the UK.
Re comment above “If the UK ever moves to insurance-based healthcare, it would be prudent to incorporate some incentives to look after your health. Any suggestions?”
No – just pick which flippin countries social insurance healthcare system we most prefer and copy it.
The whole point is they are all proven to work better than an NHS
There’s loads to choose from- Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, Japan, Singapore, S Korea, etc etc.
Don’t try to alter it , manage it, adjust it for local preferences, just do it.
I was diagnosed stage 4 b lung cancer 5 years ago, metastasised to lymph and brain. Very very poorly and prognosis bad bad bad. Private operation to remove a lobe of right lung and some lymph nodes/glands? and 2 big doses of radiotherapy on the brain. Then chemo and immunotherapy for 18 months on NHS. Then another big dose of radiotherapy on the brain, this time on NHS (though at a The Cromwell which is private). Now I have several scans ( CAT and MRI ) per year.
So, I have a lot of dealing with the NHS and they most certainly (along with the initial private) have kept me alive for much longer than anyone expected.
Personally, I have found them to be prompt and effective and well manned and competent etc etc etc, though some of the admin staff are less impressive.
Had a scan just after christmas, which requires blood test in advance, while travelling to blood test realised that I didn’t have any paperwork for it and that probably someone (aforementioned admin) had not booked it. Phoned my ward (direct line) and explained. Arrived at hospital 40 mins later and went to the ward – they had sorted it and already informed phlebotomy of the required test. Went down to phlebotomy, 1 minute wait, 5 minutes to take blood, back on the street within 15 minutes.
This is my experience, VERY LITTLE WAITING, willingness to help. In and out quickly. This is normal and I go for several scans a year.
Since covid most follow ups are by phone, so no travelling and no waiting.
This is my experience only, ancecdata if you will.
Far from the media reports of a broken NHS I find it to be rather quite good actually.
I file broken NHS along with climate crisis and water company crisis etc etc under “usual media shite”.
But that’s just me.
One last NHS story, took my 14 y.o. son for bloods and xray recently. Bloods – 5 minutes, x-ray 3 mins waiting, 10 mins for the scan – back on the street in 20 mins. Son very disappointed as he’d hoped to get more time off school
If the fatties need new knees then they’re still gonna need new knees when they’re thinner – the new ones will just last a bit longer if they’re not fatties anymore.
Its not like getting the weight off will undo the damage already done.
>Theophrastus
January 7, 2025 at 9:10 am
If the UK ever moves to insurance-based healthcare, it would be prudent to incorporate some incentives to look after your health. Any suggestions?
Yes – pay for your healthcare yourself.
Theophrastus – “incentives to look after your health. Any suggestions?”
The reward of long healthy life? If that’s not enough, I don’t know what else could be.