Thread by @DrDomPimenta

An impressively ignorant tweet. From the top then. /thread

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @DVATW view original on Twitter

1. “The NHS does not need any more of our taxes.” Currently roughly 18% of NI & Tax goes to the NHS. The retirement age is 65 for most people.

2. For someone working 18-65 on the average U.K. wage their net individual contributions beyond retirement only pay for healthcare until 74. The average life expectancy in the U.K. is 81.

3. The NHS in the last five years has fallen into a £3billion deficit, with the worst waiting times for A&E, operations, GP access and cancer care since records began.

4. It certainly does not get “more than enough”. Quite the opposite.

5. “Cut the bureaucracy” is certainly an admirable aim. As a free at the point of use service most of the bureaucracy of charging/insurance etc is already gone. See the US system for comparison.

6. I’m not exactly sure what people mean by this: cut the outpatient letters? The inpatient notes? The prescription documents? The radiology reports? Be good if you could clarify.

7. “Cut the waste” again another admirable aim. But how much “waste” is there? Compared internationally the NHS is one of the most efficient organisations in the world. (Ranked 1st and 3rd against 11 countries in two studies) commonwealthfund.org/interactives/2…

8. The NHS is the fifth largest employer in the world, with around 1.2m staff, and a budget £115billion a year in England alone. There’s no business in the world that runs 0% waste- so what’s acceptable?

9. This Harvard Business Review suggests the average is 20% lost output for input: hbr.org/2017/03/great-….
I doubt the NHS is anywhere near that high.

10. That’s not to say we don’t have waste or can’t improve: the NHS is one of the few organisations where staff create improvement projects in their own time for their employer.

11. Junior doctors for one are mandated to do one such project every year of their training (8-12 years). No time or money is given for this.

12. And obviously large waste-improvement projects (like good IT) costs money. And that comes from taxes. (See your first point).

13. “Stop treating the third world”- as far as I’m aware the NHS doesn’t have an operational budget for work overseas in the developing world. Do correct me if I’m wrong.

14. “Focus on core requirements” - what exactly isn’t a core requirement and how much money would it save? Cataracts? Already cut. Hip and knee operations? Already cut. I would say both were core to begin with. But what do I know?

15. “Charge health tourists the full whack”. Health tourism costs around £300m a year in the NHS, or <0.3% of the entire budget. We spend more on stationary.

16. If you could recoup all of that without spending any more money or time on bureaucracy and avoid unfairly penalising citizens (#Windrush), you’d still only save enough to fund the NHS for roughly 24 hours.

17. Also a new Overseas Surcharge already generates £500m a year from this same group- and hopes to get to £1bn a year by 2020. That’s a £200-700m profit.

18. Meanwhile potentially tens of thousands of extra deaths- mostly vulnerable elderly people, are occurring each year due to inadequate NHS resources. rsm.ac.uk/about-us/media…

19. So take some responsibility for your own ignorance- ambulances aren’t coming, A&Es are dangerously overcrowded, GPs are going under and people are dying.

20. There is no debate right now with higher stakes than this. Millions of lives are literally on the line. There’s no place for your ignorant twaddle. Please keep it to yourself.
/end