It's further upstream than that, it's the successive cuts to all public service.

This makes GPs the backstop for all social problems in the UK, which eventually spills into the hospitals.

What kind of social problems are people seeing GPs about, that they otherwise wouldn’t?

The example usually given is the other way round, that the woeful provision of care by the NHS leads to other public services (notably the police) becoming the backstop, e.g. for those with mental health issues.

Cuts and refactoring of Universal Credit is an obvious one.

Recently PIP payments were delayed.

Cuts to services for young people. Worsening mental health until crisis point.

Cuts to care services, leading to old people ending up in hosptial care.

All these failings compound to resulting in a medical need.

Your example of the police is where it becomes circular, as the emmergency services become the provision for other cut services.

Controversial opinion: Social care services are a way to paper over cultural and societal issues that will inevitably out-grow the funding used to do so.

We're about to discover the true depth of our societal issues, now that we've run out of wallpaper.

Current approaches to social care services are designed to paper over symptoms rather than tackle the cause. But again, that is due to poor govermental policy.

It's all top-down

Apparently the problem is also downstream - namely the inability to discharge patients who are ready to go home due to lack of sufficient community care available to support these patients.

Thus taking up a lot of extra beds and having a knock on effect on A&E queues etc

That and a recruitment problem - as I understand it. (Likely partly due to poor wages but that’s an assumption on my part)

We hired a few people from the NHS. Admin staff. They were over the moon and working hard even with lower salaries as long as they won't need to work for NHS. The workloads are insane and the shitty cynical attitude is all over the place, which doesn't help at all with morale.

Don't you guys have urgent care centers? They're fairly common in the USA.

We have the concept of a "walk in centre", but there aren't many, they are over-subscribed and they can't do much (for instance prescribe antibiotics). The typical experience there is to wait for 4+ hours to then be seen by a nurse and either sent home or sent to A&E. I am not being cynical here either!

A subtle way that government has cut services is to hand things like walk in centres to local councils to run but without increasing the funding for the councils. The councils then close them and take the political flak. The UK is not a good place to be sick and poor.

Yes, but they are also extremely overwhelmed, like everything. You will be waiting many hours in one of those

> The NHS has effectively collapsed.

Yep. A lot of people don't realise it because the loudest voices are often Brits that happen to live in locations where it has not collapsed yet, but there is basically no health service in England for a huge proportion of the population. It is only a matter of time before resources get diverted away from those locations where it still happens to be good to try and patch up the failed areas, but that won't solve the problem. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before total collapse in all locations.

Currently there is a lot of ignorance about it. People hear that it's bad but because they happen to live in an area where it happens to be good they can't really accept it. Seriously ill or dead people don't have the energy or motivation to spend time complaining about it on social media or to the press.

There is also an ideological problem for both sides. Both Labour supporters and socialists do not want to admit that the NHS is failing, because they know that if it goes then it is very unlikely to ever return, and they want to generally support nationalisation. On the other hand, Tories don't want to admit that the NHS is failing, because even for the pro-Capitalist Tories, the NHS is a patriotic symbol of the UK loved even by hardcore conservatives, and a symbol of the "blitz spirit". They also are aware of the fact that its collapse would be a sign of its own failures, since the Tories have been in power for a vast majority of the time that the NHS has been collapsing, so who else is there to blame?

I think most likely the Tories are going to try and blame this on Putin, which is quite comical.

Obviously there is this idea going around that this is being done on purpose by the Tories to encourage a move to private medicine, but I don't think this is true because the private medicine in the UK is heavily reliant on the NHS to function and the UK government aren't really doing anything at all to encourage more private hospitals to open either. If the Tories really wanted to move people from the NHS to private healthcare they would offer a statutory insurance system like in France or Germany and tell people to use it at private clinics.

Currently they blame everything on the member for Islington north!