There’s a very interesting and extensive post that’s been put up over at the Going Postal community all about the utter crapness of the National Health Service. It’s not that recent, its from November 2020, but that doesn’t matter as the NHS problems described are still with us and have been with us for decades. These problems are in my view not in any way linked to funding, but to the nature of the NHS itself.

Because the NHS is a nationalised industry it suffers from all the inefficiencies, incompetences, waste, poor prioritisation and producer capture that are inherent in nationalised industries. Just like steel, railways, telecommunications and parts of the motor industry were when they were state run entities in the UK, without a need to serve the customer, the NHS has ended up providing poor service to their customers, the patients, and become run for the benefit of those who manage and who work in them. The nature of the NHS is so divorced from the need to serve those who pay for it that the UK could funnel the entire GDP of the nation in to the greedy maw of the NHS and it would still be crap.

The Going Postal article by Colin Cross makes for sobering reading as it shows that bad patient treatment is not a recent problem with the NHS but is a problem that goes back decades. The article starts by the author describing his broadly positive experience with the NHS as a child but also goes into how he later came to question how the NHS operates.

Mr Cross said:

Time moved on and my adenoids were cauterised, which wasn’t the most pleasurable of experiences, although it did stem the frequent nose bleeds I’d suffered throughout my childhood. The NHS simply was. It existed, we used it and I’d never known a time when it wasn’t a thing. When needles hurt, or doctors were brusque, I, along with many others I suspect, simply accepted that this was how it worked. We weren’t poor, but we were “working class” and in the 50’s and 60’s we tended, in the main, to accept our lot in life.  It was probably the early 1980’s, when my maternal grandmother died, that I had my first inkling of something not being quite right in our “envy of the world” health service. She’d been diagnosed with dementia and was in the Doncaster Royal, a place that will get mentioned quite a lot in this article. I’m not saying that she was allowed to die by design, but she was allowed, unchecked, to eat a couple of pounds of green grapes and she literally shat herself to death on the ward. My mother and aunt made noises, but they were fobbed off (or placated) and that’s as far as it went.

That’s very similar to my experience of the NHS. It was always there and I have never lived in a time when the NHS didn’t exist. It was for me a constant, like the rising and setting of the Sun. It was only later that I started to see just how horrible the NHS can truly be. I saw the utter cruelty and insensitivity of women having abortions being put in the same wards as women seeking desperately needed fertility treatment. I saw how an Uncle who while being treated for cancer was put in a side room filled with soiled bed linen. I listened to people whose minds had been ruined by mental illness fail to get the treatment that their conditions warranted. I witnessed in horror the incompetence of a maternity doctor nearly cripple the mother of my child with a poorly administered epidural. I saw the crass disdain that my elderly parents were treated by the NHS and how NHS incompetence and arrogance contributed to a significant degree to my mother’s death. In every instance patients and their loved ones were ‘fobbed off’ by NHS staff and NHS institutions just as Mr Cross’s family was.

Mr Cross then went on to discuss how during the 1990’s he was diagnosed with Hepatitis C. He accepted his diagnosis and went on to take part in a drug trial that the NHS invited him to take part in but the drugs involved had serious side effects on his mental health. He eventually managed to break free of the problems caused by the medication but the Hepatitis C remained and yet again the NHS failed Mr Cross.

Mr Cross said:

I started to feel poorly over the end of the Christmas break 1997, always with the thought in my mind that Hep-C can be a killer. I returned to work on the 5th of January 1998 in agony, after being awake all night with stomach pains. By 10am I was feeling quite poorly and went to see the owner of the business where I worked, to tell him I wasn’t well. He took one look at me & told me to go home, I was literally grey.  I went to bed and slept, Mrs.C woke me at lunchtime, took one look at me and phoned the doctor. He duly arrived, gave me a cursory examination, ignored the pain and told me I had flu! He was called out again, some hours later. I was by now immobile with pain, sweating profusely and feeling really very ill. An ambulance was called and I was “blue lighted” to Colchester General.

Isn’t that horribly typical of the NHS? Here we have a patient who the doctor must have known was suffering from Hep C but whose symptoms were dismissed as merely ‘flu’. However even at the hospital the NHS again failed Mr Cross. He said:

I was left in the main corridor of the hospital, naked except for a gown and a thin sheet, I was almost delirious by now but there was little prospect of my being seen. I remember it was extremely cold & there was a cardboard vomit tray on my chest. Was I close to death? I honestly couldn’t say, but I did know something was very wrong with me. Comically, the main door of the hospital entrance fell off its runners and an icy wind, which blew straight towards me, was the only thing keeping me conscious.  I don’t know how many medical staff ignored me as they went about their work. I reached out and grabbed a young doctor and as forcefully as I could, told him of my plight. I had private medical insurance through my job and insisted that I be moved, as soon as possible, to The Oaks (more of which later) Private Hospital. I must have got through to him, a private ambulance was arranged and I was moved across town to a single room in the said establishment.

He got the treatment that he was denied by the NHS at the private hospital.

Now we get to the kicker. Mr Cross had been wrongly diagnosed by the NHS. His problem was not Hepatitis C, but issues related to a problem with his appendix which was weeping and the antibodies that his body had produced to fight the infection had been wrongly diagnosed by the NHS as antibodies related to Hep C.

There was of course no apology or compensation for Mr Cross’s distress or wrong diagnosis given by the NHS.

The author then goes on to describe how the NHS didn’t diagnose his late father’s bowel cancer and also how his mother died from a cancer that the NHS also failed to detect or diagnose.

Mr Cross said:

I could go on, avoiding the NHS where humanly possible has become almost a way of life. Cynical doesn’t quite cut it. In late 2000 my mother became increasingly worried about a pain in her abdomen, her GP had been treating her for water retention for some time, but she suspected there was a bigger problem and she was right. She entered Doncaster Royal Infirmary on a Wednesday morning in June 2001 and went straight to the ICU. She had a tumor in her abdomen, the size of a small grapefruit, which had gone undetected for many months. It’d take me several paragraphs to list fully the lies, half truths and deflections we were subjected to, as a family, over the next couple of days. The NHS gave up on her, although they didn’t tell us this. She died on the Saturday, in a dirty unlit room, vomiting up her insides as my sister and I sat with her. She was clearly in agony, although she was unable to speak. Her pain management system had failed, no one with authority was available to replace it (it was the weekend) and nurses were weeping in the corridor, distraught at their inability to help. We complained, I wanted to go to the papers, the hospital management went into full obfuscation mode, claiming that we had been kept fully informed and my mothers death and missed diagnosis were unfortunate, but understandable occurrences, they even claimed that we had collectively imagined a meeting with a doctor. My sister talked me out of making a fuss, she said the pain and the exposure would be too much. I think we should have sued them.

Yes he should have sued the NHS. The NHS seems to have a long record of failing this man and his family, just as they’ve failed thousands upon thousands of other families throughout the nation and across decades.

The NHS is not ‘the envy of the world’ as the supporters of the NHS like to put it. If it was then other nations would have copied the NHS model in its entirety. But they have not. Other nations with comprehensive healthcare systems for their citizens have chosen other means of treating the ills of their populations. Depending on the nation involved, they have compulsory health insurance, funding from taxation but with healthcare provision by private, charitable and religious entities, local government management of health services and a multitude of other systems that often perform better and have better outcomes for patients than the NHS. Those who support the NHS like it was some sort of Quasi-religion, often point to the US system where patients often end up bankrupt due to medical bills incurred in a wholly private system. But healthcare system choice is not a binary one. We don’t have to choose between the horrors of the US system and the socialist shithole that is the NHS. Other ways are available to provide healthcare and these other ways are in my view better than those offered by the NHS. Britain has tried a system of state funded and state provided healthcare and it has been an utter and complete disaster. There is enough evidence now to show that the NHS way is not the best way to provide comprehensive healthcare coverage for a nation and that British people deserve much better than we are getting from the NHS.