the nhs
is an amazing system staffed by some amazing people that has been knackered by two things.

i) mismanagement and middle management;
ii) abuse of the system, both by spurious claims and by its being raped by too many people who don't contribute anything in taxes, or who don't contribute enough for what they take out of it. it's a relic of an era when there was a smaller population, fewer elderly people and fewer unemployed, i guess.

in general, i think the nhs is there when you have a real emergency. however, i don't care which country the doctors/nurses come from, they are clearly capable when you see them in action. but they shouldn't be allowed to explain the situation to relatives if they can't speak english. by way of horrible example, we had 48 hours of expecting my mother to come round/recover when it was never going to happen, purely because the doctor who tried to explain her stroke couldn't speak the language properly and left us with entirely the wrong impression. it was the one thing that could have made the whole nightmare even worse.

then, a few days later, she was choking. we asked why they had moved the tube that had been draining fluid from her lungs, and the nurse, who also spoke very little english, said, "oh, she didn't like that tube, so she bit it." we immediately started doing cartwheels, thinking they were wrong, there was life, it was going to be fine after all, we weren't going to lose her...

until we asked the doctor and he said, "i'm sorry. the nurse means a gag reflex."

again, it was like some kind of extension to the torture.

as for the septic whinging, well, lots of places look to have a cushy deal until you live there. it's like people who live outside of london complaing about people who live inside of london complaining about the tubes. sure, if you live somewhere with 1 bus an hour and 1 train a week, london transport looks great. but when you are reliant on it, you quickly realise how overpriced and shit it is. the hospitals here are the same.

if he moved to the uk for a year, he'd run screaming back to his state of the art american hospitals and beg them to let him pay through the nose!
( rachelswipe with a fork, Fri 3 Oct 2008, 14:04, Reply)