FOAK: Private Med. Insurance

Take out of that what a decent NHS hospital offers anyway, add in the
disadvantages of private hospitals (like what happens when you arrest
on the table) and I'd happily pay a goodly sum each year to avoid what
you're spending nearly a grand to obtain. Funny old world, innit.

 

He had the same thing with the £££s for every day spent in hospital. Again,
there was a get out clause due to it being an emergency admission.

 

Odd, after an RTA my work provided private health care paid the
overnight allowance to my daughter for her stay in the NHS hospital.
They of course took details of the other parties insurers with a view
to reclaiming their costs. A child of one of my colleagues broke an
arm larking around with mates necessitating an overnight stay and
again the heath care coughed up.

 

I go with whatever comes via work, at the moment it's Cigna. Used
rarely, but they were happy enough to pay for my PFO check last year
and an MRI the year before.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique,
typed

My company medical insurance coughed £100 a day for my stay in Barnet
last year.

 

For treatment, I'd generally agree but for diagnostic procedures the NHS can
be woefully slow. A few years ago, the OH was having eye / balance
problems - the opthalmic specialist could find nothing wrong with the eye
itself so decided that we needed a scan (MRI, I think). The wait time for
the scan on the NHS was somewhere between 6 and 18 months, yet when BUPA was
mentioned we received an apology that there were no appointments for that
day, and would the next day be acceptable? Being selfish, I am glad we had
the scan quickly - the stress caused by not knowing whether there was a
neurological cause for her problems (MS was hinted at) was removed very
quickly.

While we were extremely relieved to get the all-clear, I was left wondering
why huge gulf in waiting times can be allowed to exist, especially since the
BUPA scan used the same equipment in the same hospital as the NHS scan.

 

Waiting times are a PITA but inevitable unless we pay much higher taxes so
that expensive equipment can lie idle "just in case".

The MRI scanner that your SO used is probably a joint venture between BUPA
& the NHS. Without such joint ventures much of the equipment used by the
NHS would not exist.

 

Run the bloody things 24 hours like the Yanks do. It's the only sane way to
do things when you've got such massive plant costs.

 

Ex-Pat Andy wibbled:

I think the NHS management probably couldn't organise a piss up in a
brewery [1] as was bourne out by Gerry Robinson's look at an 'orspital
and their working practices. I was really quite disturbing.

[1] swot happens when you get accountants to run things

 

I'm sure they do for emergency use. I'm not sure those people having
elective procedures would be too keen on turning up for a scan at 3am. Then
there are the preventative maintenance schedules which take place during
off-peak hours. The rooms have to be cleaned...so 24 hour operation of the
plant is impractical

 

<DING><DING><DING>

There are too many accountants trying to control non-controllable
expenditure - the NHS and the Armed Forces are two prominent examples that
affect many today, and the recent cuts into Science research will continue
to affect the UK for many years into the future.

 

It might depend on whether it was 3am or wait 6 months +

And having the qualified staff available to man it

So how many hours a day, typically would a NHS hospital MRI scanner be
in operation for ?

 

**** knows. I've been trying to remember the stats from the days I worked
in a 24/7 production environment. It was some time ago now. IIRC the
figures were suprisingly low for machines supposedly manned for 24 hours.

 

It varies hugely. My old hospital had spare capacity which it flogged
to a neighbouring trust. I suspect most scanners are not fully
utilised (even within the normal working week), the activity being
limited by how much the local PCTs can afford to buy.

 

There's a vet near Milton Keynes who hires the MRI scanner and CT
scanner from the local hospital every Wednesday afternoon.

It's not cheap, though - we (well, our insurers) had a bill for around
£2.5k for scans.

 

It is this "afford" that in many cases is an artificial concept created by
the accountants - the capital cost of the machine has been found, yet there
is an amortisation of this factored into each treatment. Surely the machine
has been paid for by the taxpayer, to then leave such machines idle because
PCTs (again funded by the taxpayer) can't afford to "pay" this cost is
ridiculous. Amortising capital costs doesn't work where both sides of the
ledger are ultimately paid for by the same person, i.e. our taxes (OK, your
taxes, since I've fled the country).

 

Looking at this, and your other contribution to this thread, it seems
an understanding of NHS finance continues to elude you. Not a problem
for you, though.

 

It's politicians that are to blame, not accountants. Ministers are very
good at ring fencing lump sums for capital projects, then holding press
conferences and photo-shoots. Very handy if they happen to coincide with a
by-election in a marginal constituency. Ministers then **** off back to
Westminster without any care about how the new asset is staffed or where
the operating costs come from. Hence we have the ridiculous situation of
NHS scanners being used by vets and whole wings of new hospitals being
mothballed as there aren't enough experienced nurses.

 

It's amazing that so much expensive equipment gets used only 8 hours per
day.

This here new cancer centre, for which the unitary charge is well over
£2m/month, can't be used properly because the Trust has a recruitment
freeze! they have known for 4 years it was going to open. Amazingly they
have only employed half the cleaning staff it will take to keep it all
sanitary anyway.

 

But it should, in an ideal world, be simple - we pay for a service through
taxes, and it is avaialble for use when needed asssuming that capacity and
staffing supports - the "free-market" philosophy is a singular failure when
it comes to application to the NHS (or defence for that matter).

And you're right, its no longer an issue - it still pisses me off how my tax
dollars, er quids, are spent, and yes, depsite no longer being in the UK, I
am still a UK taxpayer to a limited extent.