Hospitals

If the car accident had been 0330 definitely I would

I was in for a routine cat scan at around 5pm when a guy covered in blood was wheeled in - motrorcycle accodent - straqight in and did a head scan and I ened up being pushed back to nearly 6pm. I was not in the least bit upset.

You cannot believe the amount of paid leave, holidays, maternity leave etc etc nor the size of the NHS pensions..

I doubt it somehow. NHS is a sacred cow and so are those admin staff.

Exactly. And with an MRI or CAT scanner the kit is horrendously expensive

You can kiss goodbye to a million for a new CAT scanner. And it is probably scap in ten yeras, so thats £100k a year befier you even put it in a building or account for interst on it.

They must see TNP coming as my experience has been nothing like that in any hospital I have been in.

Maybe he calls them cnuts and they react accordingly?

I generally find all the staff pleasant and they know my name without me having to tell them, including the reception staff.

They also know what they are doing.

I did discover that the appointments office never gets any thanks so I took a box of biscuits in and the manager nearly cried, I have never had trouble getting the appointment I want since. 8-)

Well they are routine. A&E have their own facilities.

Its the QE in Brum not some country hospital.

Well yes NHS pensions are quite poor.

The wife has one and its a lot less than my company pension and I took early retirement that knocked it down by 20% or so.

The £50k lump sum knocked it down too, but I spent that.

I find hospital parking availability is highly variable on time. The QE in Birmingham is fine early morning, but mid-afternoon can be tricky. Good Hope in Sutton Coldfield is nearly always a nightmare.

FWIW friends had to visit Aberdeen RI recently and found it fine, but then they had to travel a good way so left out early.

And where exactly did I claim this ??. Nowhere.

The number of non-medical staff in path labs and radiology dept far exceeds the number of medically qualified ones.

Are you one of those dopy people who thinks that the doctors do all the tests (using American bioanalysers, and the like) ?.

I have worked in four NHS path labs, two of them 'local' hospitals. Both of these employed far more people than necessary to do the work load. I was bored out of my mind for much of the time.

And that was when the NHS 'only' employed 980,000 people. Nu Lab added another FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND to that total, and no they were not all 'doctors' and 'nurses'. Why do think the NHS budget shot up from from about £38 Billion to well over £110 Billion after Nu Lab got into power ?.

The Computer dept at the London hosp was about as far to the left as you could get. One girl, employed as a programmer spent most of her time visiting all the local ragtrade and other employers (nothing to do with the NHS) in her capacity as union rep and onsite Militant Tendancy activist.

When they were all out on strike one day, the hyde park bomb occurred. All around London striking NHS staff adandoned their pickets and went back to work, EXCEPT the London Hospital where the Militant Tendancy union activists told the hospital administrators that they would 'stop all operations, including emergencies' if anyone crossed the picket lines.

Sounds about right.

My local surgey did my flu jab. The nurse there is great. She did about

The woman who takes the blood tests is no nurse, but expert at it anyway, takes less than 2 mins, Its faster than if I go to the local hospital

No unions at our surgery

There is massive scope to centralise a lot of the routine pathology work line in 'super labs' serving many hospitals. There the NHS (or better still a private lab) would be able to install the best Beckman-Coulter blood counters, and other stuff and run it 24/7.

Duplicating staff (with a huge bias towards the top end of the pay scales) in every hospital is a waste of money and resources with expensive equipment sitting idle for most of its time.

The internet allows X-rays and other radiological data to be inspected by someone anywhere in the world, and not necessarily in the hospital. Silver-based xray film is now history, its all digital now. There are hundreds of thousands of highly qualified medical staff in India who can do this.

But the NHS unions would never allow it. Miliband even said he was going to 'weaponise the NHS'.

You forgot the electricity costs. An MRI scanner has superconducting magnets needing a vast supply of power. The LArge hadron collider is said to have 2 French nuclear power stations dedicated to powering the refridgeration gear needed for the hundreds of superconducting magnets that it uses.

Thank god we only have one proton-beam therapeutic centre, but I wouldn't put it past the Trots to piss away another billion or so having a few more if they get into power (not made in the UK remember).

Quite why we cannot simply keep on buying time on the German ones is a mystery.

All haematology technicians were expert at taking blood in my working days. Only larger hospitals employed phlebotomists to go round the wards, the junior house officers on the wards wrote out the request forms, took the bloods and brought them to the path labs. The lab technical staff took the blood tests for out patients.

Now you have to be specially qualified to take blood, with all the public service beaurocracy that goes with it. And instead of cheap disposable syringes and a collection of screw capped containers for the various tests (EDTA, heparin tubes, clotted samples etc) the NHS now used the Vacutainer system.This is another wonderful American development where the various sample tubes contain a vacuum and require the vein to be hit before pressing the sample tube onto the back of the needle. These cost many many times what the old disposable syringes cost, but are necessary to comply with H&S and in the era of HIV and other self-inflicted nonsense unavoidable.

I doubt it.

Even going non-stop for 24 hours only gives 1'26" per jab.

Being a good and quick phlebotomist is a skill that takes a lot of practise and experience. If the patient has veins like tree trunks just under the skin it's fairly easy. However I have small veins that are deep, a well practised and experienced phlebotomist doesn't have a problem, others can be digging around in different places in both arms...

Would you have been happy with that routine scan being booked in for

Niether would I be in that situation.

Drivel.

If she was a member of the old NHS superannuaton scheme then for each year worked she would have earned a pension of one eightieth of her FINAL years salary (including London Allowance !! **).

Assuming 40 years service she would have got a pension of 40/80'th of her last years income. During those 40 years she would have got to the top of any incremental scales, and might have ended up in a pay grade many times what she started on, but her 40 years of pension entitlement would be based ONLY on her income in the LAST year of work.

The days when NHS staff were underpaid is history, they are very well paid, lots and lots of non medical NHS pay scales go up to £40K, £50K and well beyond, notably so for all the new bullshit 'manager' jobs that Nulab created in 2001 (mostly filled by existing NHS staff whose exsting pension accruals were multiplied many times simply by getting one of these new positions).

I was paid £984 a year when I started in the NHS, and if I had stayed and done what so many others did, just drift up the annual incremental scale, get promotions based on 'buggins turn' I could easily have ended up as Laboratory manager (new Lab bulshit job title), on £60K+.

That would mean a final salary pension of about £30K plus a tax-free lump sum of 3x, so another one off £90K. Paid from age 60.

You would need a pension fund of about £1.4 Million to buy that pension at todays low interest rates. There are not just hundreds, but thousands of baby-boomer NHS staff now retiring on pensions like that.

even someone at the bottom earning perhaps £24K a year after 40 years service would get a pension of £12K, a lump sum of £36K and you would need a pension fund of about £550,000 to buy that pension.

The average private pension FUND is about £50,000 !!, but that average includes the likes of Fred Goodwin with a fund of over £10 million.

And remember, a private pension fund of £1.4 mIllion would mean a Life Time Allowance tax hit of 55% on £350,000 of that pension fund.

Oh, plus the state pension too on top of those amounts, whereas many private final salary schemes operate 'claw back' at SPA, where the private pension drops by the amount of the state pension. just try and get THAT past the NHS unions.

I would have been quite happy for an appointment well after 5PM, not necessarily at 0400, but lots of people do work unsociable hours already, outside the NHS.

Easy with a conventional syringe and needle, but these are no longer allowed, so it has to be the dreaded Vacutainer system.

Bad news if you have poor or deep veins.

The senior thoracic surgeon at the local south wales hospital where I worked in the 70's was known by the theatre nurses and blood bank technicians as 'Chopper Harley'.

We were always handing out O neg and hurredly xmatching more units when he was operating.

A couple of years later when I moved to a London teching hospital I soon noticed that the same operations were being done without using any of the xmatched units at all. Every day a dozen or so blood packs would be returned to general available stock after the patient had had the op and gone on to ITU. This was the difference between being admitted to a teaching hospital in the 70's or a crummy local hospital.

All the junior surgeons knew he was incompetent, but could not speak out, without destroying their own career.