UK's NHS: 'I've been let down – I shouldn't have stage-4 cancer' | Hacker News Reader

UK's NHS: 'I've been let down – I shouldn't have stage-4 cancer'

bbc.co.uk

It feels strange to me that while experts are saying there is a crisis at the bottom of the article, the start of the article spends quite a lot of time on a lady that has a very fast growing tumour and had two mammograms cancelled due to covid.

Presumably, the writers thought that was a more impactful story, and added a human touch but to me it signals the opposite. What would the new policy be "don't have pandemics"? Even with 20/20 hindsight, I'm not sure what could be done differently for this particular case.

The only real obvious one is "Her cancer was growing quickly, she was told, but it would be eight weeks before a mastectomy could be scheduled to remove her breast."

But, presumably the people to do the operation were booked out for those 8 weeks with operations for other people with serious cancer issues.

Possibly the system is totally broken and they randomly assign appointments based on star-signs, but they don't actually tell us anything like that, just that everything is busy due to Covid.

And presumably that applies to everything medical, not just cancer or mammograms or mastectomies. If it was just one specific region, or specialism, that would be a much more tractable problem.

Cancer specialists weren't deployed onto ICUs - what happened in the last few years was that protocols meant that operations had to be done far more slowly or not at all.

A close friend of mine had an operation be cancelled because two specialists would have had to be in the same room and that was not possible "cus covid"[0].

So now there's an enormous backlog of which at least some was completely avoidable.

[0]"cus covid" - i.e. not actually because of coronavirus, but because we were doing things like following arrows around on the floor, having people isolate for weeks on end during periods in which every tube carriage had at least one person who had the virus, etc.

>But, presumably the people to do the operation were booked out for those 8 weeks with operations for other people with serious cancer issues.

more likely all operations were cancelled while everything was on pointless lockdown

Not from the UK but acquaintances from London pretty unanimously agree that NHS is great value as long as it is nothing urgent, but akin to Russian roulette for serious operations. Would say in Switzerland(where there is a weird version of universal healthcare) where I am this also kind of holds true, but 2 years is unthinkable here

It didn't take 2 years. That was the time measured, somewhat arbitralily, from the initial cancelled mammogram.

The actual time is left somewhat vague but the information they give narrow it down to between 7 months (that was the time from her finding the lump to seeing an oncologist) but then an unspecified time to get the scan and recieve the results, (if things had gone better you could add another fraction of 8 weeks, since that was how long the wait for the surgery was, but that date must have been set some time before they got the results and knew that it was too late). But either way less than 12 months, since she spotted the lump in late 2021 and we're currently not yet in late 2022.

So 7/8 months for a breast lump being spotted to a scheduled mastectomy, and at some point in that process it was identified as fast growing, in the time after COVID. Is that fast or slow? I don't know, but I kind of feel like after reading an article about it I should know, and people shouldn't be left with the incorrect impression that it took 3x as long.

I'm 100% pro-Obamacare, as it gave me access to options I didn't have before (medical insurance for pre-existing condition; I have Cystic Fibrosis). However, in the lead up to its passing, one of the (undoubtedly biased and leaning) articles I read in those days was a discussion in how long it took CF patients to get care in the UK (as critics were trying to make a flawed 1:1 comparison). I also know that many of the revolutionary drugs that have come out for CF had significant delays before becoming available in the UK.

The NHS is in a mess at the moment due to being starved of funding well prior to covid, backlog due to covid, lost a lot of staff due to Brexit, and other ridiculous things such as the current gov't got rid of free tuition for nursing so what a surprise we have a shortage of nurses because they don't get paid enough to pay back hefty university fees. The model of the NHS is fine, but if not funded properly especially in the aftermath of a pandemic, it will collapse. The only hope is a future government may be able to fix it but that requires a big injection of cash, therefore may require tax rises. And time to actually implement that. I believe that private healthcare companies spread anti-"socialised-healthcare" sentiment simply because a well-funded NHS or US equivalent would be a lethal competitor. Meanwhile, there's some private healthcare available in the UK, its much cheaper than in USA, but only covers certain things, its not comprehensive. I guess maybe other nearby countries such as Ireland , have a much better developed private system for people who want to pay to jump the queue. Everyone in the UK is screwed by the current situation. You'd have to be super rich or lucky to pay your way to get the right treatment if you need it early, but as I say the private market isn't that well developed. A friend has just got a detached retina which needs surgery urgently. Last I heard he was contemplating paying £8000 for a private op cos the NHS just doesn't have resource to do it quickly.

It's a travesty. Nurses and doctors used to get extensive accommodation, food, tuition, and others perks that made people flock to our health service. It's was efficient by sheer economies of scale. The envy of the world for its effectiveness a treated everyone, quickly, at point-of-service for free. Not only that, we were one of the most innovative when it came to cutting edge treatments. Consecutive Tory governments have gutted it, and have the audacity to blame issue with the NHS on anything else but their own enforced austerity measures. It infuriates me more than any other topic in politics currently.

> Meanwhile, there's some private healthcare available in the UK, its much cheaper than in USA, but only covers certain things, its not comprehensive.

Also, in the UK we have NHS funded but privately provided healthcare. That's often terrible (see eg all the CQC reports) but also the private companies can't afford to do it. Babylon Health, a very large GP services provider, is handing back the contracts because they can't make it work.

Everyone should be concerned about a single health care option

There are plenty of horror stories about "the American way" in health care too.

Absolutely. Every death attributed to the opportunity cost of not switching to a system based on something other than private ownership is necessarily a product of the capitalization of healthcare. This is definitionally true.

but lack of access to time sensitive care isn't one of them. if you feel things are going too slow, you can go online and google the names of different doctors to see.

In the UK there are private health care options.

From personal experience, it's not quite a silver bullet either.

Nothing ever is.

The issues with the the NHS getting gutted by conservatives who want everyone to subscribe to their mates insurance, does not stop folks who provide insurance based healthcare from doing the same. It's not like Americans really have any choice on their hospital, either they are the one covered by their insurance or they are too expensive for most people.

If they cut spending on the hospital, there really isn't any recourse.

Why?

The problem with state-run healthcare is that right-wing parties will always sabotage it when they are in power. The “government can't work” narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You see this particularly obviously in the United States, but similar things happen with every state service in pretty much every democratic state.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com