Steerpike

My 89 year old mum has enjoyed pretty good health up until recently. She's recently been suffering from COPD, heart failure, water retention, and so on. I happen to be visiting her and have experienced first had just how well she is being looked after by the local NHS in Lancashire.

On Friday, I went along with her to meet her GP, a lovely Asian lady. Despite signs up on the wall saying appointments are only 10 minutes, she spent a good 45 minutes with us and apparently did the same last week. The doctor has arranged for a 24-hour ECG test, an echo-test, various blood tests, a cardio specialist visit, and more. My mum was prescribed a blood thinner, a beta-blocker, and a diuretic. On Saturday, on our way back from a great Indian meal out, she banged her (water-retention-swollen) leg against the wheelchair and had a very large 'blood blister' form - about 4" by 1", very scary looking. Since she just started taking blood thinners, we worried that if it burst, she may bleed badly so we called a 'district nurse' number, and in a few hours a couple of lovely nurses showed up at her home and did a great job of bandaging the entire area. Today (Monday) there was a lot of pain in the area, so I called the district nurses again at 4pm, and they came out again around 8pm, and noticed a lot of redness /etc and they decided to call a doctor, so then an on-call doctor visited within an hour and gave her penicillin to prevent infection. Tomorrow she goes in to be fitted for her 24 hour ECG, and Thursday she has another appointment (I can't keep track of what that one is for), and on Friday the nurses are coming back to change the bandage on her leg.

All this for an 89 year old. And not even a mention of payment. I'm pretty impressed.

md95065

My mother, who passed away last year at the age of 96, also received excellent care from the NHS right up to the end.

rpjs

I think my Dad's NHS care in Bolton was pretty good. OTOH my cousin in WA lost her mother who lived on the Isle of Wight recently and she is furious with the poor care she feels her mother got from the NHS there.

Nutmegger

My sister has been undergoing chemo since last November. After her final session next week, she will undergo a scan -- and then have to wait a month for the results. Apparently the NHS outsources reading the scans overseas and thus it takes such a long time. That sounds insane to me. When she was first diagnosed in September, they said she was stage one; by the time they had finished messing around taking forever to schedule tests and obtain results, she was stage four. I can't imagine waiting a month for test results in the US.

lansbury

Nutmegger

Octang Frye

I hope your mother gets well soon.

Giantaxe

Can't comment on the NHS, but some in the US struggle to get appointments/tests in a timely manner, for example some Medicaid patients, especially those in rural areas. And the uninsured may be truly out of luck. But I certainly agree that those with good insurance who live in areas with a good supply of doctors, your treatment - at a cost - will be pretty good. Mine has been.

Lion in Winter

I'm sorry to hear this and hope she's doing better now.

This all screams for proper funding of our health service. It is shameful what has been done to it. I hold no brief for Tony Blair but if I remember correctly he did invest in it and wating times went down.

GeoffM

Happens here in the US too. Depending on the doctor I might get an email telling me my results are online within minutes of the lab finishing them. Other times I've had to wait a month because the doctor won't release results in any form except face to face, and doesn't have appointments for a month.

Then you get a mystery bill from the lab nine months later for $32 which the insurance didn't cover. Not much but it was so long ago I now I have to check that that bill is genuine - I've had so many fake bills it's not funny anymore.

Good and not so good in the NHS, both for patients and for staff. I don't recall any particularly bad experiences for any of my family - usually quite the opposite.

yellowroom

The NHS is truly wonderful and I will have a tear in my eye when they celebrate its 70th birthday in July - I was born in the hospital that launched the NHS on 5th July 1948 and have passed the plaque proclaiming this proud fact every visit - from childhood illnesses and broken bones, volunteering as a teenager and as an adult visiting ill relatives.

Having said that, there is a degree of lottery with how good your local services are, which is down to two factors - the policies of your local Health Authority on the structure of their care facilities (hospitals, clinics etc) and what treatments they will fund, and how well your local GP surgery is managed. My parents are fortunate to live in an area that has both excellent services for geriatric patients, and a great GP surgery. The only thing I would say is that even when you get excellent services it does help if you have someone who can advocate for you if you are not up to dealing with all the appointment and letters. Sometimes there are slip ups with letters and appointments and you (or an advocate) need to be able to chase up and query where necessary. I suspect though that this is not unique to the NHS, but any busy healthcare system dealing with chronically ill patients.

scrubbedexpat091

Pretty much the same in Canada, just finding a doctor accepting patients can be near impossible. Hospital care is generally good, but not always, really depends where you are, post code lottery of sorts.

Specialist waits are long at times as well, I had to wait 9 months for a heart specialist and my wife a bit over a year for a specialist.

kins

Ah yes - the wonderful NHS. This was my stepsister's experience

Faulty machine delayed Cheryl Cope blood poisoning diagnosis - BBC News

uk_grenada

scrubbedexpat142

No EU Country is listed by the WHO as having a TB incidence rate of ≥ 150 / 100,000 (their highest risk criteria).

Some non EU Countries that have a rate ≥ 150/100,000 include India (211), Pakistan (268), Bangladesh (221), Nigeria (219), Guinea Bissau (374) and Phillipines (554).

In total 55 countries feature a rate ≥ 150/100,000 - this total includes some "eastern" Eastern European Countries (non EU, not qualifying for FOM & whose inhabitants require visas and possibly screening). These include Armenia (44/100,000), Azerbaijan (66), Belarus (52), Georgia (92), Kazakhstan (67) & Russia (66).

Eastern European EU members check out out as follows Hungary (9), Czechia (5), Poland (18), Bulgaria (27) and Latvia (37). Only Romania has a rate greater than 40 / 100,000.

For comparison, France (8), Germany (8), Austria (8), UK (10) & non EU Switzerland (8).

Demographic of London Borough of Ealing = Non white: 47%, British / Irish white 37%, non British/Irish white: 16%.

According to the Lancet UK TV rates have declined significantly in the last 5 years.

Sources: Public Health England, NHS, gov.uk, Ealing Borough Council, The Lancet.