Nhs Quotes

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.

REAL HEROES ARE THOSE WHO RISK THEIR LIVES TO SAVE LIVES

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

But it’s a Saturday night and the NHS runs a skeleton service. Actually, that’s unfair on skeletons – it’s more like when they dig up remains of Neolithic Man and reconstruct what he might have looked like from a piece of clavicle and a thumb joint.

The growing number of politicians and newspaper-owners who aim to privatise the NHS need to fuck off ten times, then gargle a big bowl of diarrhoea. I pray that Vishnu purifies your heart in a dream tonight, or, failing that, that you fall down a deep well in February.

Offer me?" A shrill note of indignation entered her voice. "Young man, there are three things that make Britain great. The first is our inability at playing sports." How does that make Britain great?" "Despite the certainty of loss, we try anyway with the absolute conviction that this year will be the one, regardless of all evidence to the contrary!" I raised my eyebrows, but that simply meant I could see my blood more clearly, so looked away and said nothing. "The second," she went on, "is the BBC. It may be erratic, tabloid, under-funded and unreliable, but without the World Service, obscure Dickens adaptions, the Today Program and Doctor Who, I honestly believe that the cultural and communal capacity of this country would have declined to the level of the apeman, largely owing to the advent of the mobile phone!" "Oh," I said, feeling that something was expected. "Oh" was enough. "And lastly, we have the NHS!" "This is an NHS service?" I asked incredulously. "I didn't say that, I merely pointed out that the NHS makes Britain great. Now lie still.

Brexit promised three hundred and fifty million a week for the NHS, they promised controls on immigration, they promised an end to the housing crisis, to the education crisis, to the economic crisis, to the …” “What I don’t understand is that when the British public voted to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatface, the government said no. But when we voted to commit cultural and economic seppuku, the powers-that-be didn’t seem to have a fucking clue …

I remember his face when my father said that he no longer had private health cover, how quickly he left the house, how he dropped his unctuous demeanor like a brick. He sent him straight to the hospital in an NHS ambulance and left without saying goodbye.

Nobody joins the NHS looking for plaudits or expecting a gold star or a biscuit every time they do a good job, but you'd think it might be basic psychology (and common sense) to occasionally acknowledge, if not reward, good behaviour to get the most out of your staff.

No job in the world is worth destroying yourself over, even if you work in a brilliant, beautiful place like the NHS. It’s OK to take a break or a breather. It’s also OK to step away altogether, if that’s the right thing to do. In a world of people telling you not to rock the boat, sometimes you have to fuck the boat. Do it with as much love and tenderness as you can manage, but grab your trunks and start swimming. Only you know what’s in your heart – whether it’s becoming a caricaturist in Leicester Square, moving to Chad or moving in with Chad. I promise you’ll sleep a lot better.

Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt. ....The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street.

Thank God we’re raising a generation who are so comfortable getting naked online. ‘I’m afraid it looks like you’ve had a stroke. No, my mistake, you’re just buffering.

If there had been a cost for calling an ambulance, I wouldn't have done it. I couldn't have afforded it. I would have let myself die.

dwindling bee community.

Was this really the supposed better deal from surrendering our military hospitals in favour of gaining better clinical experience from the NHS?

Black Knight: "I'm impressed. You even mended the t-shirt." Faiza: "Mate, you're with the NHS now.

a combination of her polycystic ovaries and my low sperm count meant we’d had to rely on NHS-funded IVF to conceive. But on our second cycle, bingo! We were expectant parents.

but the NHS is something special, and the alternative is horrifying.

Goodbye," said Dave, failing to make eye contact, but instead addressing a poster on the wall between us, which proclaimed that assaults on NHS staff would not be tolerated.

Terry took the silence as acquiescence, “The other way to make money is to exploit people, oh, no sorry, that’s the ‘only’ way to make money, exploit other people, that’s how the billionaires have acquired all their money by exploiting others… So how did they achieve it? You’re going to love this… they changed all the rules to accommodate what they wanted to do. How I hear you ask… easy, they own the politicians, they own the banks, they own industry and they own everything. They made it easier for themselves to invest in so called emerging markets. What once would’ve been considered treasonous was now considered virtuous. Instead of building up the nation state and its resources, all of its resources, including its people, they concentrated on building up their profits. That’s all they did. They invested in parts of the world where children could be worked for 12 hours a day 7 days a week, where grown men and women could be treated like slaves and all for a pittance and they did this because we here in the west had made it illegal to work children, because we’d abolished slavery, because we had fought for workers’ rights, for a minimum wage, for a 40 hr week, for pensions, for the right to retire, for a free NHS, for free education, all of these things were getting in the way of them making a quick and easy profit and worse …had been making us feel we were worth something.

The bottom line is that NHS GPs have no bloody right to comment on vaccinations. Ever. They are interested parties. A GP's remarks about vaccination are as valuable as those of a drug company spokesman.

the government’s so-called ‘market-driven reforms’ of the NHS seemed to be driving the NHS even further away from what went on in the real market of the private sector, in which I was once again a patient.

There needs to be a nationwide awareness programme for all NHS staff, to educate them about dissociative disorders. Diagnoses need to be more obtainable within the NHS; people's lives should be placed ahead of funding restraints and bureaucratic red tape. We need minimum standards of care and treatment agreed and implemented within the NHS to end the current nightmare of the postcode lottery—not just guidelines that can be ignored but actual regulations.

Reader, I did the stupid thing. I looked her up on Facebook. It didn't take more than forty minutes to filter this Katie Ingram from the other hundred or so. Her profile was unlocked, and contained the logo for the NHS. Her job description said: "Paramedic: Love My Job!!!" She had hair that could have been red or strawberry blond, it was hard to tell from the photographs, and she was possibly in her late twenties, pretty, with a snub nose. In the first thirty photographs she had posted she was laughing with friends, frozen in the middle of Good Times. She looked annoyingly good in a bikini (Skiathos 2014!! What a laugh!!!!!), she had a small, hairy dog, a penchant for vertiginously high heels, and a best friend with long, dark hair who was fond of kissing her cheek in pictures (I briefly entertained the hope that she was gay but she belonged to a Facebook group called: Hands up if you're secretly delighted that Brad Pitt is single again!!).

I know why I want to give blood – for donation feels like an act of thankfulness. It acknowledges that you are alive, and grateful for it, and wish to share the gift of living with someone else for whom living has become, suddenly, perilous.

In the UK we see the skyscraper-high bills in America as the Ghost of Christmas Future unless we fight to stop the NHS getting privatized. Politicians may act dumb, but they’re not, and we’ll be lured very stealthily into this particular gingerbread house.

mean, they’ve admitted that the money won’t go to the NHS. And they’ve admitted we aren’t getting some fabulous trade deal. And they’ve said that immigration won’t even go down now, too. It’s as if everyone agrees that it’s a stupid idea, but everyone accepts that we’re going through with it anyway. It’s like a horrible toddler who has made a stupid decision but is sticking to it rather than admitting the error. It all smacks of cutting off your nose to spite your face more than anything else. Cutting off your continent

A big report published in 2015 showed why the government is so keen to silence the Professor David Nutts of this world. It showed that the total costs of alcohol use in England (including the NHS, police and welfare) amount to £3.9 billion. While alcohol taxation in England rakes in £10.4 billion. So, heavy drinkers make the country £6.5 billion, after the costs of taking them to hospital, policing them or giving them benefits. A tidy profit indeed. Now it becomes clear why the British government don’t want people to stop drinking. ‘Shut it, Professor Nutt.

She had arthritis, which meant that sometimes she experienced the agony of her diamond rings not fitting. She complained to the doctor about it constantly; she’d paid good money for those rings and somehow felt that the NHS simply didn’t want her wearing them – socialist cartel that it was.

...patient evidence has repeatedly found that cognitive behaviour therapy is ineffective and graded exercise therapy can make the condition worse.

I pray that by the time you read this a vaccine is widely available.

I reflect that if we are going to be asked to risk our lives, the least we can expect is to be treated like people.

I could have a room to myself, with a carpet and with my own loo – details that are very important to patients but not to NHS administrators and architects. Nor, I am afraid to say, do many doctors care about these things, until they become patients and come to understand that patients in NHS hospitals rarely get peace, rest or quiet and never a good night’s sleep. I

As we stood on our doorsteps and clanged our pans, politicians were handing out billion-pound contracts to their mates. As we put rainbows in our windows, nursing home residents were being all but murdered by their idiotic policies. And throughout, as NHS staff put their lives at risk, as they worked double and triple shifts, as the PPE cut into their faces, as they moved out of their family homes for months on end, the ghouls in charge seemed far more concerned with their own appearances and legacies. And there’s still nothing approaching an assurance that the NHS won’t be sold off in five years’ time, plunging us into an unfair insurance-based system that mostly benefits the former politicians who stuff the boardrooms of private medicine.

with the proper information and rationale, which it is my job to provide, people have a nearly limitless capacity to adapt and to rise to the occasion, whether for themselves or their family members.

This is not a story which denies trans identities; nor that argues trans people deserve to lead anything other than happy lives, free of harassment, with access to good healthcare. This is a story about the underlying safety of an NHS service, the adequacy of the care it provides and its use of poorly evidenced treatments on some of the most vulnerable young people in society. And how so many people sat back, watched, and did nothing.

I just care about you so much … but I’ve always got this fear that … one day you’ll leave. Or Pip and Jason will leave, or … I don’t know.’ Fresh tears fell from my cheeks. ‘I’m never going to fall in love, so … my friendships are all I have, so … I just … can’t bear the idea of losing any of my friends. Because I’m never going to have that one special person.’ ‘Can you let me be that person?’ Rooney said quietly. I sniffed loudly. ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘I mean I want to be your special person.’ [...] ‘But you know what I realised on my walk?’ she said. ‘I realise that I love you, Georgia.’ My mouth dropped open. ‘Obviously I’m not romantically in love with you. But I realised that whatever these feelings are for you, I …’ She grinned wildly. ‘I feel like I am in love. Me and you – this is a fucking love story! I feel like I’ve found something most people just don’t get. I feel at home around you in a way I have never felt in my fucking life. And maybe most people would look at us and think that we’re just friends, or whatever, but I know that it’s just … so much MORE than that.’ She gestured dramatically at me with both hands. ‘You changed me. You … you fucking saved me, I swear to God. I know I still do a lot of dumb stuff and I say the wrong things and I still have days where I just feel like shit but … I’ve felt happier over the past few weeks than I have in years.’ I couldn’t speak. I was frozen. Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.’ She grabbed the bunch of flowers and practically threw them at me. ‘And I bought these for you because I honestly didn’t know how else to express any of that to you.’ I was crying. I just started crying again. Rooney wiped the tears off my cheeks.

It can’t be long before burnout is recognized by the NHS as a type of work-related stress. But we should be vary of using it as a non-specific term. Almost every single zeitgeisty buzz word or phrase has suffered the fate of overextension. Like “gaslighting” now applied to the mere act of criticizing a woman and “toxic” now applied to any kind of friendship or relationship that isn’t gold style perfect. I’ve heard people describing themselves as burned out when actually they are just really tired.

My legs are not quite properly operating and I’m having physiotherapy every Tuesday,” Michael said after Emma had beaten him to the phone. I accompanied him on one of these sessions, where he had to wait like anyone else for his turn. I was amazed that he did not have someone come to the house and that the therapy was not more frequent. He could barely walk now. But he was loyal to the National Health Service, the creation of his hero Nye Bevan and avoided any appearance of seeking special treatment or assistance outside the NHS.

Cameron’s only part of the story anyway,’ Charlie continued. ‘The way I see it, everything changed in Britain in May 1979. Forty years on, we’re still dealing with that. You see – me and Benjamin, we’re children of the seventies. We may have been only kids then, but that was the world we grew up in. Welfare state, NHS. Everything that was put in place after the war. Well, all that’s been unravelling since ’79. It’s still being unravelled. That’s the real story. I don’t know if Brexit’s a symptom of that, or just a distraction. But the process

Youssef El-Ginghly, a Tower Hamlets GP, writing in the Observer in March 2013, described how the NHS is being dismantled and concluded: This is what saddens me: what were once the NHS’s strengths – resources, expertise and the united focus on the patient – are being replaced by a fragmented and atomized service, bound not by a duty of care but by a contract and driven, not by what is best for the patient, but by the cost of the encounter. It will be a slow, insidious creep but it’s coming. Be prepared. This is the way the NHS ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

Imagine you’re diagnosed with epilepsy: what would you think if you weren’t referred to a specialist but taken to a psychiatrist to treat you for your ‘false illness beliefs’? This is what happens to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) patients in the UK. They are told to ignore their symptoms, view themselves as healthy, and increase their exercise. The NHS guidelines amalgamate ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, assuming symptoms are caused by deconditioning and ‘exercise phobia’. Sufferers are offered Graded Exercise to increase fitness, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to rid them of their ‘false illness beliefs’.

Based on our own experiences, we know that despite the many challenges DID brings, with the right understanding, help, and treatment, all DID survivors can have a better future. So surely having to fight constantly for recognition, for understanding, and for funding to access the right care and treatment is utterly wrong.

What’s going on?’ she said. ‘Talk to me.’ ‘I …’ I looked down. I didn’t want her to see me. But Rooney was looking at me, eyebrows furrowed, so many thoughts churning behind her eyes, and it was that look that made me start spilling everything out. ‘I just care about you so much … but I’ve always got this fear that … one day you’ll leave. Or Pip and Jason will leave, or … I don’t know.’ Fresh tears fell from my cheeks. ‘I’m never going to fall in love, so … my friendships are all I have, so … I just … can’t bear the idea of losing any of my friends. Because I’m never going to have that one special person.’ ‘Can you let me be that person?’ Rooney said quietly. I sniffed loudly. ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘I mean I want to be your special person.’ ‘B-but … that’s not how the world works, people always put romance over friendships –’ ‘Says who?’ Rooney spluttered, smacking her hand on the ground in front of us. ‘The heteronormative rulebook? Fuck that, Georgia. Fuck that.’ She stood up, flailing her arms and pacing as she spoke. ‘I know you’ve been trying to help me with Pip,’ she began, ‘and I appreciate that, Georgia, I really do. I like her and I think she likes me and we like being around each other and, yep, I’m just gonna say it – I think we really, really want to have sex with each other.’ I just stared at her, my cheeks tear-stained, having no idea where this was going. ‘But you know what I realised on my walk?’ she said. ‘I realise that I love you, Georgia.’ My mouth dropped open. ‘Obviously I’m not romantically in love with you. But I realised that whatever these feelings are for you, I …’ She grinned wildly. ‘I feel like I am in love. Me and you – this is a fucking love story! I feel like I’ve found something most people just don’t get. I feel at home around you in a way I have never felt in my fucking life. And maybe most people would look at us and think that we’re just friends, or whatever, but I know that it’s just … so much MORE than that.’ She gestured dramatically at me with both hands. ‘You changed me. You … you fucking saved me, I swear to God. I know I still do a lot of dumb stuff and I say the wrong things and I still have days where I just feel like shit but … I’ve felt happier over the past few weeks than I have in years.’ I couldn’t speak. I was frozen. Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.’ She grabbed the bunch of flowers and practically threw them at me. ‘And I bought these for you because I honestly didn’t know how else to express any of that to you.’ I was crying. I just started crying again. Rooney wiped the tears off my cheeks.

They Should Have Asked My Husband You know this world is complicated, imperfect and oppressed And it’s not hard to feel timid, apprehensive and depressed. It seems that all around us tides of questions ebb and flow And people want solutions but they don’t know where to go. Opinions abound but who is wrong and who is right. People need a prophet, a diffuser of the light. Someone they can turn to as the crises rage and swirl. Someone with the remedy, the wisdom, and the pearl. Well . . . they should have asked my ‘usband, he’d have told’em then and there. His thoughts on immigration, teenage mothers, Tony Blair, The future of the monarchy, house prices in the south The wait for hip replacements, BSE and foot and mouth. Yes . . . they should have asked my husband he can sort out any mess He can rejuvenate the railways he can cure the NHS So any little niggle, anything you want to know Just run it past my husband, wind him up and let him go. Congestion on the motorways, free holidays for thugs The damage to the ozone layer, refugees and drugs. These may defeat the brain of any politician bloke But present it to my husband and he’ll solve it at a stroke. He’ll clarify the situation; he will make it crystal clear You’ll feel the glazing of your eyeballs, and the bending of your ear. Corruption at the top, he’s an authority on that And the Mafia, Gadafia and Yasser Arafat. Upon these areas he brings his intellect to shine In a great compelling voice that’s twice as loud as yours or mine. I often wonder what it must be like to be so strong, Infallible, articulate, self-confident …… and wrong. When it comes to tolerance – he hasn’t got a lot Joyriders should be guillotined and muggers should be shot. The sound of his own voice becomes like music to his ears And he hasn’t got an inkling that he’s boring us to tears. My friends don’t call so often, they have busy lives I know But its not everyday you want to hear a windbag suck and blow. Encyclopaedias, on them we never have to call Why clutter up the bookshelf when my husband knows it all!

I just care about you so much … but I’ve always got this fear that … one day you’ll leave. Or Pip and Jason will leave, or … I don’t know.’ Fresh tears fell from my cheeks. ‘I’m never going to fall in love, so … my friendships are all I have, so … I just … can’t bear the idea of losing any of my friends. Because I’m never going to have that one special person.’ ‘Can you let me be that person?’ Rooney said quietly. I sniffed loudly. ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘I mean I want to be your special person.’ [...] ‘But you know what I realised on my walk?’ she said. ‘I realise that I love you, Georgia.’ My mouth dropped open. ‘Obviously I’m not romantically in love with you. But I realised that whatever these feelings are for you, I …’ She grinned wildly. ‘I feel like I am in love. Me and you – this is a fucking love story! I feel like I’ve found something most people just don’t get. I feel at home around you in a way I have never felt in my fucking life. And maybe most people would look at us and think that we’re just friends, or whatever, but I know that it’s just … so much MORE than that.’ She gestured dramatically at me with both hands. ‘You changed me. You … you fucking saved me, I swear to God. I know I still do a lot of dumb stuff and I say the wrong things and I still have days where I just feel like shit but … I’ve felt happier over the past few weeks than I have in years.’ I couldn’t speak. I was frozen. Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.’ She grabbed the bunch of flowers and practically threw them at me. ‘And I bought these for you because I honestly didn’t know how else to express any of that to you.’ I was crying. I just started crying again. Rooney wiped the tears off my cheeks.

It would be easy to make this purely about local authority budgets, but the privatisation of social care has cloaked the profession in a profit-making penumbra which at times seems to trump the welfare of those the sector is supposed to serve. For many of the companies that vie with each other for business, elderly people are first and foremost pound symbols on a balance sheet. The corporate jargon which permeates the sector reflects this avaricious raison d'être. Elderly people are 'clients', 'customers', and 'service users'. 'Patients' are a separate category of people for whom the NHS has to send a ambulance in emergencies.

My attention was drawn to the Parliamentary Petitions website initially by a petition for a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Hunt. I’d never signed a petition before but when I saw one against Jeremy Hunt, I couldn’t resist. If you’re not familiar with him, imagine one of the vampires from Buffy, only 100 times less compassionate and in control of the NHS. I signed the petition, along with hundreds of thousands of others.

The largest and most recent ME Association survey (ME Association, 2015) of patient evidence on the acceptability, efficacy and safety of CBT, GET and Pacing involved 1428 respondents. In this case, 73 per cent of respondents reported that CBT had no effect on their symptoms and 74 per cent reported that their symptoms were made worse by GET.

she get in gingerly, saying, ‘To the hospital

Patients are no longer willing to put up with interminable delays for treatment and, if it takes the threat of legal action to spur the politicians to fund the NHS properly, so be it.

The most important limitation of [clinical] guidelines is that the recommendations may be wrong... Practices that are sub-optimal from the patient’s perspective may be recommended to help control costs, serve societal needs, or protect special interests (those of doctors…or politicians, for example).

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Any government can balance the books by not investing very much. By 1997 the NHS was in such a wretched state that hospitals were being compared unfavourably with those in Eastern Europe. In London, theatres issued warnings to audiences, urging them to leave much more time than they might anticipate to get to the venue, because public transport had become so unreliable

I entered the kitchen. If it had been a very busy previous seventy-two hours or so for the crews, it sometimes resembled the kitchen from the politically incorrect, yet hilarious UK sitcom The Young Ones.

In twenty years since the end of the war, we still hadn’t sorted out the slums. Twenty years. We’d built the NHS. We’d whitewashed rock’n’roll and sold it back to the Yanks. But we still had families living in one room without running water. It was a fucking disgrace. It truly was. Dad would have been spinning in his grave, if there’d been enough of him left to bury.

Professor Sir John Bell, the chair of medicine at Oxford University and the president of the Academy of Medical Sciences, would later tell the parliamentary health and social care select committee that there may have been a deliberate policy to avoid testing NHS workers due to staff shortage fears.

She and fellow doctors were angered by the government’s positive messages about how well the NHS was coping. ‘I understand there’s a balance between not wanting to panic people, and I also understand about reputation management. But every evening at the [government’s televised media] briefing you just couldn’t recognise anything that they were saying. It was so discordant with what we were seeing. They’d made it all up.

It’s a sad fact of life, Cage, that we’re not very good at this sort of thing in our country. Politicians, useless NHS managers, chief execs who swindle their shareholders and rob the pension pot – they all get very generous golden goodbyes, but those who risk their lives, or fight for their country, or spend their lives working in the shadows, or give up the chance of a normal life, those who actually do serve, selflessly and with dedication – well, they don’t.

NHS England. Why did they allow the early blocking of puberty to be rolled out as routine practice without demanding to see some data supporting this radical shift? Why didn’t it insist on seeing any data at all?

Nick Seddon, a top official in the right wing think tank Reform, who would soon join Cameron's government as an adviser, recommended that the NHS reduce staffing by 150,000, eliminate up to 32,000 hospital beds, and reduce discretionary procedures "such as coronary bypass and mastectomy." Writing in The Guardian, Seddon said McKinsey had found that these measures, among others, could lead to annual savings to over £20 billion in 2014-2015.

Presenting” is a lot harder than it looks at first; it takes years to sieve what is and isn’t relevant information for a colleague,

Boris was boasting of “shaking hands with everybody” only three weeks ago.

The provision of public healthcare across the UK provides a bedrock of support that has shaped our society for the past 75 years.

It was Thatcher and her government who began the long trajectory that has led us to a situation where thousands of NHS services in England are now run by external providers including private companies.

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In total, between 2008/09 and 2020, 32,000 overnight hospital beds were cut in the NHS in England.3

NHS staff dread winter because nothing quite curdles the soul like pouring your all into a system at breaking point.

tens of trusts up and down the country are running into the red. More than a third of NHS trusts in acute deficit are hospitals built under PFI.10

The original capital cost (i.e. actual value) of the Barts Health PFI was £1.1 billion (around £1 million per bed) but will end up costing £7.1 billion by 2049.14 £6 billion will go to the PFI consortium Skanska Innisfree and partners. Barts Health are paying £100 million a year in interest before they even see a patient.15 That’s £3 billion, just in interest, over 30 years. Imagine what you could do for healthcare in East London with this money. So

The Princess Royal Hospital in Bromley was another Innisfree gift to the taxpayer. It will cost the NHS ten times what it is worth—that’s £1.2 billion.16 It’s the main reason why South London Healthcare Trust went bust in 2012. Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital is another PFI part-owned by Innisfree. A few years into the contract, the PFI owners refinanced it, raising their annual rate of return from 16 to 60%. There

His calculation showed that the NHS employs more than four times as many managers and support staff per nurse than a private hospital.

The first Constitution for the NHS, in 2008, states that ‘the NHS belongs to the people

healthtalk.org

Michael’s career as a government minister made him a target of the tabloids. The Daily Mail ran a series of articles claiming that during a hospital stay Michael had received special treatment. But Michael accepted only the care available to other NHS patients. “I didn’t like taking libel actions because I’m a journalist,” he noted. Indeed, he had had to defend himself in libel actions that resulted from his articles. But when the tabloid continued to publish false stories and refused to retract them, Michael sued, forcing the paper to pay him £6000 and issue an apology. “They went to every kind of length to prove that I was wrong ... They couldn’t get the nurses to say anything ... They’re swines [the tabloids], you know.

Dr. Jane Collins As chief executive of the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) for Children NHS Trust, Dr. Jane Collins oversees the hospital of which Diana was president during her charitable career. GOSH specializes in the treatment and research of childhood illness and remains one of the most notable facilities in this field in the world. I’m sure we all remember the day she died as if it was yesterday and will never forget our sense of grief and personal loss. But our abiding memory is of a warm, compassionate princess, with a deep affection for babies and children, comfortable with people from every background, of whatever nationality, and in whatever circumstances they met.

It’s unthinkable, now to live as her parents had done, going to work from nine to five and enjoying the benefits of the newly-formed health and education services. What paradise it had seemed! Now, in order to pay their exorbitant mortgages, and ever more exorbitant fuel prices, British adults have to work long hours – the longest, it is said, in Europe… Everyone they know, everyone they see, is just like them, living in houses like these, reading the same papers, seeing the same films and TV programmes and plays, buying from the same shops and sending their children to the same schools; and they think it will go on for ever, either ever-mounting property prices cushioning them. But it can’t.

Dr Power stood up. “Because your staff are not components that can be fitted in, or replaced when they are unpredictable, or when they are simply being human. Because our patients are not playing a game called ‘business’ with profit and loss and winners and losers. Because patients have no choice, but to be patients and it’s our privilege to be in a temporary position where we can help them. And, inevitably, when we ourselves fall ill; when we grow old, then we can only hope that we will receive the help we ourselves need in turn. Because that’s the reality of life. And not some self-aggrandising game". - Dr Power, speaking in The Good Shepherd

There was a young man from Nantucket Who got hit on the head with a bucket It started to throb So he got out his knob And got all the nurses to suck it. I chuckled, then the hairs on the back of my neck started to prickle. I looked up to see Nurse Sarah (late twenties or early thirties, chirpy, on the cuddly side—she could have been Gary’s twin sister) reading over my shoulder. “Sorry, love,” she said. “This is the NHS. You’ll have to go private if you want that kind of service.

Neither the privatisation of the NHS, nor the values that are being trampled on in the process, have been properly discussed in the mainstream media. Most journalists (or ‘churnalists’) swallowed and regurgitated government press releases. The publicly-funded BBC has avoided probing too deeply, for fear of reprisals when the licence fee renewal has to be approved by government. These failures of what Burke named the Fourth Estate (the news media) have contributed to what (to change philosopher) Friedrich Engels described as ‘false consciousness’. It explains why many will have voted for parties that may bring about their financial ruin, or that of their children, if they are foolish enough to fall ill. The money men, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, rule more and more of our lives. Democracy is dying. Hence my radicalisation. If my impotent rage lands me in jail, I might, like Bertrand Russell, see it as an opportunity to spend more time on philosophy. © Prof. Raymond Tallis 2014

I had to choose my words carefully in explaining how the American-inspired monetarist policies of the Thatcher government – which had been in power for the whole of Tim’s lifetime – were destroying our already overloaded, free NHS. The truth was that in encouraging a new self-seeking materialism, those policies were destroying not just the health service and our educational system, but the very fabric of society. Indeed Mrs Thatcher had denied the existence of society: for her it consisted of nothing more than a set of individuals with no sense of common purpose. It was an unfortunate time to be ill, unemployed, very young, elderly or otherwise socially disadvantaged.

while public spending more than doubled under the financially incontinent Gordon Brown and Ed Balls from £322bn to over £700bn, the number of frontline workers in the NHS, policing, local government and education only went up by a modest ten to fifteen per cent.

COVID vaccines do not protect children from hospitalization or death associated with COVID-19 because healthy children are not being hospitalized or dying with COVID-19 [NHS statistics].

The growing number of politicians and newspaper owners who aim to privatize the NHS need to fuck off ten times, then gargle a big bowl of diarrhea. I pray that Vishnu purifies your heart in a dream tonight, or, failing that, that you fall down a deep well in February.

While we were moving from Camden Town, London, to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, there was much to do: and Elena did almost all of it. At the outset she made it clear that by far the greatest obstacle we would face -- the most time-consuming and labour-intensive, the most tediously labyrinthine, and the most extortionate -- had to do with American healthcare. One afternoon I gingerly looked into it; and after an hour or two I thought, Well at least there’ll be no ambiguity in our case: if any Amis gets so much as a headache or a nosebleed, it will be far simpler and thriftier for the four of us to fly first class to London, take a limousine each to the Savoy, and then, the next day, wander into one or another of the NHS.

So Cummings bought a big red bus for Vote Leave. He had politicians drive around the country, speaking to voters. And on the side of the bus in large white letters it read: “We send the EU £350 million a week; let’s fund our NHS [National Health Service] instead.

According to the latest NHS figures, Black men in the UK aged between thirty-five and forty-nine are four times more likely than white men to be detained under the Mental Health Act and ten times more likely to be under a Community Treatment Order (CTO). The figures for Black women are also disproportionate: roughly six times more than white women.

Having defeated global fascism, a ruined country rebuilt itself from rubble thanks to the most progressive government in our history and the talents of its children, kids raised by and large outside of the establishment and the elite on a diet of orange juice, free school milk, NHS specs, Watch with Mother, public libraries, art schools, galleries and all the other benefits of a forward-looking state and a commitment to the public good not the private profit.

One way to introduce market forces was for private companies to buy NHS hospitals, particularly underperforming ones. Dalton, the British health official who was the focus of intense McKinsey politicking, met with McKinsey consultants on December 17, 2010 to sort through their options. They had a prospective buyer in mind - Helios - a private German hospital chain. Internal records showed that the parent company of Helios had been a McKinsey client in recent years. By the time lawmakers and bureaucrats began to consider the new NHS law, consultants were deeply embedded in Britain’s government. In 2010 the NHS alone spent £313 million on management consultants.

They constantly struggle to supply the NHS and other sectors. But you can guarantee the war machine is well stocked and well oiled.

Because the NHS budget covers everybody, the money saved on one patient can be used to treat another. Declining to operate on a sick grandmother means there is more money available to treat sick children. Accordingly, protests about denied coverage tend to be muted. In the U.S. system, that trade-off doesn’t apply; if an American insurance company refuses to pay $36,000 for Herceptin for one of its clients, the money saved is likely used to enhance profits.

After beginning his medical career as a junior doctor in Sri Lanka, Dr Sittambalam Rajasundaram GP worked as an SHO in the National Health Service in the UK before moving into General Practice. He served the NHS for four decades as both primary and secondary care physician. A caring, patient attitude has made Dr Sittambalam Rajasundaram GP popular amongst patients.

Yet an investigation by the BBC programme Panorama discovered the move was at least partly a way to get around the shortage of protective equipment in the NHS. The problem was that the Health and Safety Executive had earlier ruled that the very top level of PPE should be worn when dealing with a disease ranked as an HCID. The change in classification therefore meant health workers could be kitted out with less protective equipment – making the most of the threadbare stocks available. The government had requested that the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens remove Covid-19 from the HCID list.

while my colleague sat next to her and completed the relevant documentation.

In fact, Britain was, in effect, buying back the PPE it had given China for free in February. It would also take another six to eight weeks before Britain was able to purchase these supplies from China and, by then, the NHS was already running out of protective kit, with some medical staff having to resort to buying their own makeshift kit from DIY stores.

Ed glanced once more around the room. He wished they were back in the UK with the nice, reliable NHS. He liked the NHS. He knew where he was with the NHS with its tired look and its practical furniture. OK, it was horribly underfunded and it didn’t have coordinated decor with fancy accents, but his experience across the few dramas of his lifetime – appendicitis and a broken leg – had been good. The staff brilliant.

Humanitarian Arithmetic (Sonnet 1354) If it takes $300bn to end world hunger, and 7 trillion to fund the next AI wonder, how many people have to starve to death, to feed the appetite of the cyberworld? If Britain's NHS costs about $200bn, and US military costs 800 billion dollars, how many have to suffer from sickness, for the tribal chiefs to feel secure? If it takes $20bn to end homelessness in the US, and trillions to colonize Mars, how many have to sleep in cardboard boxes, for heirs of billionaires to breed on Mars? You don't need to be a Ramanujan or Euler, to solve this simple arithmetic equation. But you do need a living human heart, to take responsibility for the solution.

The World Health Organization’s 1995 definition of privatisation within healthcare is ‘a … process in which non-government actors become increasingly involved in the financing and/or provision of health care services’.38 And this is exactly what is happening in the NHS.