The NHS – Britain’s failed state within a state

Right! I’m suffering from minor blood poisoning due to a a tooth abscess I’ve had some Amoxicillin, some painkillers some Scotch and a sleep, now I can write this piece.

Yesterday I had to make use of what is laughably called ‘an NHS emergency dentist’. I normally keep my distance from the National Health Service as much as possible because, lets not too fine a point on it, its a pile of crap. I don’t have private health insurance at the moment and I’d rather self-treat minor ailments myself than have to submit myself to ‘Bevin’s Butchers’ any more than I have to.

My experiences and that of my family and friends of the NHS has not been good. The NHS could have killed my father because when he was in hospital because they put the wrong medicines in his personal medicine cabinet, I have had an uncle suffering from stomach cancer who was put in a room containing blood and faeces stained sheets from other patients, and the health of the elderly father of another friend declined dramatically after ‘treatment’ in an NHS hospital and went from someone who could get around with a walker, into someone who was bedridden and tube fed. That’s just some of my and my friends negative experiences of what is laughably referred to as ‘the envy of the world’.

The NHS is a failed method of delivering effective healthcare to a population. The inherent conflict of interest of having the Government both pay for, set policy for, and also supply the service has never been properly dealt with and this has resulted in inefficiencies, ‘producer capture’ and in the case of the Stafford Hospital scandal, mass deaths. Just look at my own experience today for just one minor example of why the NHS could be described as a ‘failed state’ within a state.

Can you imagine any private sector business treating a customer how I was treated yesterday and staying in business?

Firstly I phoned up the emergency dental service only to be confronted by a telephone booker who a) couldn’t speak much English and b) managed to get my date of birth, address and postcode wrong three times. So frustrating was this call and and the fact that I had little confidence that the call taker would record my details accurately, that I abandoned any attempt to make an enquiry via this route. I then looked at the website for the local NHS emergency dentist and the website showed opening times, all well and good. They seemed to be operating an open turn up and be seen system. Perfect or so I thought.

After a bus journey and a quarter mile walk I got to the clinic in the town centre, the waiting room was virtually empty and I asked the receptionist if I could be seen. I was then told that there were no ‘slots’ available and that I should have phoned up, even though there are no obvious instructions to that effect on the emergency dental website. What made this all worse is all I needed was a repeat prescription of antibiotics for a recurring dental infection, something that should take any competent doctor or dentist no more than five minutes to sort out.

I walked back through town angry that the NHS had screwed up and misrepresented itself yet again and went to a pharmacist to see if there was anyone who could help. Pharmacists cannot prescribe medicines in the UK but they told me to go to the local NHS walk in General Practitioner Access Centre.

I walked about three quarters of a mile to the centre (my face is so swollen with infection that it’s affecting my vision therefore I didn’t drive). To check into this walk in centre I had to fill out a form where at least a quarter of it was complete faff and irrelevant to why I was there. After waiting 45 minutes in a windowless waiting room full of sick people, some coughing their guts up, I was called into the doctors room.

The doctor whined on that ‘oh we don’t do dentistry stuff here (ironically when she called me in she was standing under a large sign saying Dentistry – This Way), you have to go to the other place across town’. I explained to her that I’d already been there and their website was a lying crock of shit and could she give me a prescription for antibiotics. She examined my mouth and told me what I could have told her in the first place, which is that I have a dental abscess. She then wittered on about how I haven’t followed the correct ‘procedure’ to be seen and annoyingly made it seem as if she was doing me a favour in writing my prescription even though I, as a taxpayer, am technically her employer.

This is just one minor example of why the NHS is rubbish and why no other nation has copied the all in one and one size fits all British National Health Service. Just to get a prescription for a basic commonly available drug meant I had to deal with bureaucracy, producer capture, deliberate obstruction, rude staff, intrusive questioning and inefficiency. What is quite illustrative of the problem with the NHS, from my dealings with it yesterday was that the only person I encountered who treated me with respect or politeness was the person who worked for the private sector pharmacist, the public employees on the other hand were rude, obstructive and useless.

I would like to point out that my experiences and frustration with the NHS are only minor ones, many peoples experiences of the NHS are far far worse than mine.

To my American readers, if you think that Obamacare is a disaster now, just wait until it morphs into an American National Heath Service, you will have all that which is wrong with the British NHS but on a much larger scale.

Look to the disaster that is the British NHS and behold the future health care system that is coming to the USA. I live in your socialist health-care future, and it stinks.