About six times in my life, I’ve made use of the NHS doctors.
Three of those times was simply going to my GP. All five times, I got genuinely good advice, but only twice I got a prescription.
Twice, I have been admitted to a hospital for minor things… Despite all the press, I found them clean, well staffed and efficient.
Once, I had a major operation. I really can’t tell you how great everyone at the hospital was. Nurses, doctors, general staff. Sure, the food sucked and the ward was a bit ‘cosy’, but I never expected going to hospital for a barrel of laughs.
Overall, though, I think the government’s obsession with statistics, and the media’s obsession with scare stories, are creating the impression that the NHS is ‘broken’ and therefore needs to be dramatically changed. But the changes are always pushing it further and further downhill.
One of the worst statistics is ‘patient satisfaction’. Increasingly bombarded - US style - with information about various drugs, most patients want a prescription every time they see a doctor. People tend to feel a bit cheated, perhaps even humiliated, when they go to the doctor and he says ‘just go home and take some rest’. Yet most of the time, that’s all people really need. The last time I went to a doctor, it was for fairly severe back pain that was keeping me up at night. He told me to start doing yoga, stop wearing a satchel bag, and take ibuprofen when it hurts. I did both, and it worked. When I first left the surgery, I felt like he hadn’t believed me when I said how much it hurt (I’d been taking ibuprofen and it hadn’t made an ounce of difference). Looking back, I can see that I really didn’t need the pain medicine I was hankering after.
Patient satisfaction surveys often serve as a means of grumbling about not being given anything, forcing doctors to give patients pretty much whatever they want to make them happy. I’ve heard in the US, people actually go in to the GP and ask the GP to give them specific medicines that they’ve seen advertised, and after the patient reels off a few symptoms listed in the adverts, the doctor often gives them the medicine they are asking for. People actually tell the doctor what medicine they want! As if they might know better than someone with a medical degree, because of an advert they’d seen!
The NHS is good as it is. At least, good as it was about 7 years ago. There are plenty ‘horror stories’, but given its size this is fairly inevitable. It’s time we stopped trying to pass new regulation every time the tabloids pick a new story, and time we stopped trying to ‘measure’ the unmeasurable, before we break something that up till now has actually been working extremely well.