Is the lack of available GP's to blame for NHS crisis?

sir albion said:

Also when we was kids and fell over....you know the days when kids climbed trees etc etc and had gashes in their heads when falling etc.These days a small gash on the knee or head and parents rush to hospital because like you say the pathetic panicking sets in.

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Guy Fawkes said:

There are so may contributory factors to a lot of the problems our public services and the NHS suffer from

Our national debt grows by £5,170 per second and stands at approximately £1,804,935,000 at the time of this post. when it first hit £1,000,000,000 this was posted and fairly relevant to the topic


At the moment, 8% of all tax revenue collected goes on just servicing this national debt, that's before we start to think about how we spend money on our services.

It's very easy to just say we will increase public spending or raise taxes to help fund these services, but it won't tackle this underlying problem and the issue will still cause problems for generations to come (regardless of who is in power)

The more you increase tax, the less individuals have to spend (making them fall nearer to the poverty line) and this can also affect the economy because of less spending by the population, and this could lead to reduced business tax revenues or force people out of work as companies fail or lay of staff to reduce costs. It also could mean wages don't grow as companies cant afford to pay more as margins are tight (possibly leading on more reliance on the state by the lower paid to survive)

It's a fine balancing act and one that Governments can aid by making sure that money is used in a way to give maximum value / efficiency to the taxpayer, but this is not always the culture we have in our services (budgets have to be spent or they get a smaller budget the following year so there is no real incentive to save money by careful purchasing, etc, and not to use up any remaining budget by spending it in the last couple of months of the financial year on things that aren't really needed just for the sake of using it) or from the public (for example, if the Police are facing budget constraints / cuts, the last thing they need is to spend some of their budget tacking social unrest and protests about cuts) but also there is a reluctance to accept change (strikes, etc)

The balance between public and private business should be widened (30% public, 70% private or possibly even wider like 20% / 80%) so that we have an economy built on private business which pays staff from their own turnover and they pay tax into the Government coffers and not have an economy that is not as reliant on the public sector for employment (the money to run and pay for staff comes from the Government and from taxes and public borrowing). The way to achieve this isn't to shrink the public sector, (but may be needed to start with to cut tax burdens on the private sector) but to grow the private sector and make sure it is not strangled by taxation and bureaucracy. The extra tax revenue from the private sector is what then helps to fund our efficiently run public sector (and any excess used to reduce our national debt) But there needs to be an end of this culture that private is bad and based around greed and exploiting the workers and public is good and they are all saints that can do no wrong

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yxee said:

I don't think he mentioned immigrants. The country is full, whomever you choose to blame. Personally I also blame people having ten kids.

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goldstone said:

And I think you'll find that the families having ten kids are not "white british".

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drew said:

So, which areas of the public sector are you going to throw overboard? NHS, Military, Highways, Social services, emergency services, education, regulatory bodies, HMRC. You take some arbitrary percentages and with a sweep of the pen decimate lots of peoples lives. Perhaps, the answer could be that those in work pay their fare share. The majority do because they have no choice through PAYE but there is a massive amount of tax avoidance that could swell the public coffers, eliminate the deficit, create a surplus and start reducing the national debt? Just an idea.

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goldstone said:

That's true, but how much more investment? And whose money? As a taxpayer I do not want my money invested in infrastructure that is purely there to enable further immigration and further growth in the population.

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The Antikythera Mechanism said:

Unfortunately, doctors surgeries are full of malingerers and the grossly obese. A £10 consultation fee and entry turnstiles that will only admit tubbies up to a certain girth would go some way to resolving the problem.

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goldstone said:

That's true, but how much more investment? And whose money? As a taxpayer I do not want my money invested in infrastructure that is purely there to enable further immigration and further growth in the population.

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ThePompousPaladin said:

Fair enough, what is the population growth out of interest?

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Guy Fawkes said:

It's not about getting rid of services like Highways, Social Services,etc, but about using the money well within those services and being able to get money from sensible levels of taxation from the private sector to pay for it without stifling the private sector

Part of the problem in the public sector is that they have a yearly budget after that year is over, a new budget is set. If they spend it all, they get the same or more the following year (whether they really needed it or not) and fail to spend it all, they lose some of their budget (be it on a departmental level or as a organisation as a whole) - If there is no benefit to securing the best deal or prices for items they need to run, why would they, especially if they still would have to spend any savings they made later on somethig they may not need?

It's too rigid imo, and doesn't allow for real life changes in demands on their cash. One year may see a higher use of a particular service than normal, yet their budget is uniform over the years and doesn't allow them a pot to dip into to finance the years where demands are higher. Surely being able to carry over an excess is far better but they usually can't under current systems? However this still depends on the people responsible for the budgets acting in the best interests of the services, and not having someone who decides to blow the budget early on unnecessary things and leave them short further down the line. Maybe an alternative would be a 3 year rolling budget, allowing them to better cope with peaks and troughs and allowing hem to save some money and carry it over into the following year without penalty.

All the while the economy is around 50 / 50 pubic to private, it's going to keep needed extra borrowing or cuts to our services to make it affordable.

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Guy Fawkes said:

It's not about getting rid of services like Highways, Social Services,etc, but about using the money well within those services and being able to get money from sensible levels of taxation from the private sector to pay for it without stifling the private sector

Part of the problem in the public sector is that they have a yearly budget after that year is over, a new budget is set. If they spend it all, they get the same or more the following year (whether they really needed it or not) and fail to spend it all, they lose some of their budget (be it on a departmental level or as a organisation as a whole) - If there is no benefit to securing the best deal or prices for items they need to run, why would they, especially if they still would have to spend any savings they made later on somethig they may not need?

It's too rigid imo, and doesn't allow for real life changes in demands on their cash. One year may see a higher use of a particular service than normal, yet their budget is uniform over the years and doesn't allow them a pot to dip into to finance the years where demands are higher. Surely being able to carry over an excess is far better but they usually can't under current systems? However this still depends on the people responsible for the budgets acting in the best interests of the services, and not having someone who decides to blow the budget early on unnecessary things and leave them short further down the line. Maybe an alternative would be a 3 year rolling budget, allowing them to better cope with peaks and troughs and allowing hem to save some money and carry it over into the following year without penalty.

All the while the economy is around 50 / 50 pubic to private, it's going to keep needed extra borrowing or cuts to our services to make it affordable.

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BensGrandad said:

A lot on the tv news about hospitals cancelling cancer ops so is this in effect sentencing those concerned to death.

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goldstone said:

And I think you'll find that the families having ten kids are not "white british".

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biddles911 said:

Yes and stop the school run clogging up the roads and get the lazy little b****ers to walk or take the bus to school like we had to.

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Harry Wilson's tackle said:

Nonsense. I live in a small town whose population has barely changed in 20 years. It is at least 95% white British. When I first moved here it took about 3 minutes to drive through town to get on to the A2. Now the roads are always clogged. Why? because peope are richer, and instead of making infrequent journeys to the shops, often by foot, half the twon drives to one of the two big supermarkets every day. A place is always 'full' in as much as people and their activities expand to fill the space available. This has always been true of roads and has nothing to do with actual population.


I note that you live in Faversham, a sleepy backwater on the North Kent coast. It hasn't attracted a rise in population in recent years because it lacks industrial growth potential. It is one of those " off the radar " towns that quietly goes about its business, without attracting too much attention. Immigrants aren't attracted there as there isn't the work available and little or no history of multi-culturalism.
If you lived in the Blackwater valley area ( Farnborough, Aldershot, Camberley etc ) or the Thames Valley ( Reading, Bracknell, Maidenhead, Slough etc ) you would notice that things are a lot different. Here, business is vibrant and population is growing rapidly ( Reading is now the largest town in England ) It is here that the most pressure is being felt. The pressure on housing is at an unprecedented level. The urban sprawl is now eating up green field sites everywhere. Planning permission is being granted on open farmland and estates are springing up everywhere. The road network is being put under more strain than it can bear. In these areas, they cannot build more roads but are constantly building more roundabouts and traffic lights to try and control traffic moving to and from this new housing. This slows traffic flow and causes tailbacks that never previously existed.
Speak to anyone who lives in these areas and they will tell you that the infrastructure cannot keep pace with our ever rising population. If we could build more hospitals, schools and doctors surgeries at the rate at which supermarkets are being allowed to develop, then we wouldn't have a problem.
Our small island has much beautiful and unoccupied ( by humans ) countryside but the majority of people don't want to live there. They want to be where the work is and therein lies the problem. Major areas of rapidly growing urban sprawl that cannot possibly hope to offer the best lifestyle possible to its inhabitants because of the pressures created. It is nothing unusual to wait 4 days for a doctor's appointment or 6-7 hours in an A&E dept.
Pressure on the roads has everything to do with population growth. The number of vehicles on our roads grows every year and will keep growing. Try a dose of the M25/M4 around Heathrow every day and you will notice a bit of difference from getting out of Faversham.

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Brighton Mod said:

Its a contributory factor, but not the isolated reason, more demand, increasing aged population, peaks, media seeking a story, lack of funding, increased public expectation and its mainly in A&E.
Have spent a lot of time in hospital recently and it seems to me to be full of older people, A & E is rammed and then when on a ward before and after a procedure that ward is half empty. Daughter is an A& E nurse, turning away people with spots, cuts and headaches. Demand definately peaked across Christmas and the department was actually expecting a surge for which contingencies were made.
A&E is not a walk in service and patients are triaged on need immediately they present, news reports are not being accurately and branding the A & E problem as general, which is not the case.

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maltaseagull said:

We were talking about this yesterday.

I have been to A&E once in my life after a motorcycle accident.

My parents didn't " like to bother" the doctor unless they were really ill and used chemist bought remedies and taught us the same.

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Lord Bracknell said:

The bizarre thing about A&E units is that they deal with accidents AND emergencies. Why should someone with a broken ankle have to be triaged in competition with someone who has had a cardiac arrest? Separate units for injuries and health emergencies surely make sense, no? And pharmacists should be treating earache.

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