Let's get real in this country. We are bottom of the league in cancer survival rates, we don't have enough specialists, and we ration the chemotherapy drugs that could improve people's survival rates. The fact is, NHS money is spread too thinly across the service and it is time to look seriously at what we want the NHS to provide for us. We could have the same level of care for trivial and serious problems, or we could have a health service that focuses on the killers like cancer and heart disease. Clogged service I have been chatting to specialists within the NHS and was astonished to discover that across the UK more is spent on prescription laxative drugs than cancer chemotherapy drugs.
Politicians talk about rationing, but then force GPs to do the dirty work.
Prescribe on clinical need they tell us. However, we have a dependency culture where patients expect a cure for all ills. Yes you are, but you can't have it both ways. Because the NHS is a free service, patients attend hospital with trivial things because there is no incentive not to. Needless visits Any GP will tell you that only a very small number of their patients really needed to see a doctor and could easily have coped with the illness themselves, perhaps with a hot lemon, or a diet of All Bran.