Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

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eccles
 
 
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by eccles »

I had my seasonal flu jab on Tuesday in the local Boots store and for the first time that I can remember I had a mild reaction to it with a slight headache and a bit of discomfort under the armpit of the jabbed arm. It passed in a couple of hours. Two weeks earlier I had nothing more than the usual stiff arm the following day after the new Moderna bivalent covid booster.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by Furby »

I never said all that only the first bit.

I am not sure about having an insurance because it would be like dentists and there just wouldn't be any care at all for patients who can't pay and that would include pensioners who paid towards NHS all their lives but can't afford new insurance now they need care. But there pretty much isn't any care now unless people stay on phones for an hour 8am to 9am day after day until get through and then have a phone they are able to answer in three rings when they get the call back from a doctor. If you "miss " the call they log it as a missed appointment and it's back to square one getting a new appointment. Missed appointment are going to be chargeable aren't they so it's almost at charging for gp appointments as it is.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by OurCreature »

All the indicators are heading in the wrong direction again, and in the 7 days to 3 October more than 10% of people who took covid tests had covid. The actual numbers for deaths aren't high compared with earlier peaks and I hope it stays that way.

And Ponteland MSOA near Newcastle-upon-Tyne has gone light purple on the coloured maps.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by Wildrover »

Sorry Furby - still getting the hang of the new board. You did only say the first sentence, the rest is mine. The way the continental systems work is that everyone gets a certain level of care - those on benefits and pensioners have their care paid for by the state though some countries do make everyone pay 20% of the cost of a GP appointment which is around £10. I personally don't have a problem with this as it would deter some of the time wasters. Those of working age tend to have some or all of their premiums paid for by their employer - in the UK employers get off really lightly with just NI to pay on top of salary. In most of Europe the employer has to pay the employee's pension and healthcare costs - when I used to budget for my employees I would mark up their salaries by whatever the local taxes were and in the UK the cost was 1.13 x employee's salary. In Germany it was 1.35x and in France and Scandinavia it was 1.5x.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by merry »

This is so true and why I hate all state monopolies like the NHS. The employees know you have no choice but to use their "service" and behave accordingly - that's why you end up with 10 people booked for a 2pm appointment. If you have to hang around waiting for 2 hours that doesn't matter as long as you don't waste any of doctor's valuable time
My daughter (our member, STPD) is but a lowly nurse, rather than a doctor, but this could not be further from the 'service' she gives her patients. She works many hours over time (unpaid) and often travels miles and waits for a patient who then does not turn up. She gives her absolute all and more to the often very needy people she is assigned to care for, and obviously her caseload is far higher than it is supposed to be, and her hours longer than she is paid for, the staffing on the ward often a third what it should be. She will laugh when she sees your post, or "The first rule of the nhs is what is easiest for the staff."
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by Wildrover »

That is admirable of STPD and may well be true for most nurses but it certainly isn't the case for GPs and consultants. The last time I saw a consultant my appointment was at 2 pm and I was seen at 4pm because they booked 10 people - the entire afternoon's caseload - for 2pm. When I complained I was told that doctor's time was too important to be wasted so they made sure that there were several people waiting. This is of course if you can get an appointment which is not the case at my GP surgery because 12 out of 13 of the GPs are part time. If it is urgent - and you have to go through a 30-40 minute wait on the phone and then the Spanish Inquisition with a receptionist who will use her extensive medical training to determine if your problem is urgent - then you can attend and wait until the duty doctor sees you. This is usually a 1-2 hour wait. that's why I say the NHS is run for the convenience of the staff rather than the patients. In business if you were two hours late for meetings you wouldn't have a business.

The NHS acccounts for around 20% of government spending so over the course of my working life I've been forced to pay around half a million pounds for a service I wouldn't touch with a bargepole if it weren't a state monopoly. As I've mentioned before the substandard care my father received directly caused his premature death and on the one occasion I had surgery for a relatively simple case of a herniated disc the surgeon screwed up the operation so badly I spent three years unable to walk and in immense pain and needed 4 further operations to correct the botched surgery. I made forrmal complaints about both of these incidents - I didn't even get a reply either time. I don't think I have ever had a doctor see me at the appointed time and the entire service has a cavalier disregard for their patient's time. So whilst I know there are many people working hard in the NHS my experience of it has been almost universally bad and I resent being forced to pay so much money every year to fund it. If I got such shoddy service at a garage, a supermarket, a tradesman or even a pub I just wouldn't use that company in future - with the NHS there's no choice. It's not just the patients who are fed up as staff seem to be leaving the NHS in droves so the problems are clearly systemic and that's why I would move to an insurance based system - it would be beter funded and offer more choice to patients so the poorly performing units would be forced to close.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by OurCreature »

I know WR's family have had very bad experiences in their dealings with parts of the NHS and other branches of the public sector, and I am very sorry about that. However, what he says about hospital appointments is true in my experience. In the months before she moved into Knightwood my mother was investigated for a stomach ulcer; she suspected it might be cancerous and said to me that if it was she didn't want surgery or chemotherapy but would rather have palliative care to make what time was left to her as comfortable as possible. We had a round of hospital appointments so that they could shove those little cameras down to her stomach via her mouth and throat, and each consultation was later than the time of the appointment. The final consultation was around 2 1/2 hours later than her appointment time, and I had to work very hard to keep her in her waiting chair instead of going home because I knew it was vital that that appointment was kept. So I agree with WR about hospital appointments and that is a management issue rather than a clinician issue, unless some clinician thought it is a good idea to keep Joe Public waiting endlessly.

When she finally had to go into hospital, after I found her so weak in her stairlift chair that she couldn't get up out of it and I really thought she was going to die before the medics arrived, the consultant in charge of the ward she was in put in a stent so her food could actually get into her digestive system and diagnosed cancer and agreed with us that palliative care was the best option.

However, things have got better with my dealings with the GP surgery. A couple of years ago I dreaded having to phone them because I knew there would be a long wait of 45 minutes or so before I got to the front of the queue. During the past year I have found that I get through very quickly (usually 2 or 3 minutes) and I can book my B12 jab with no fuss; the first time the call handler tried to fob me off with having pills instead of a jab, but I protested at that and declared my preference for a jab. So she consulted one of the doctors and I got my jab and no questions about that again. When I go there for my jab I'm usually seen slightly before the proper appointment time (they have a screen where you check in so they know you are there) and if they are running late it's usually by only a few minutes. My GP experiences at the practice have been OK for most of the time I have been with the practice which is 40 years.

One thing I do not like is the trend to telephone consultations. I had one of those for diabetes a couple of years ago, and pointed out to the nurse that if I had actually been at the surgery she could have had a look at these little brown spots that had suddenly appeared round my ankles and the bits of my feet closest to my ankles, and decided if they were just spots or an indicator of something worse. She immediately gave me an appointment for a few days later so I could go and have them checked - nothing to worry about, in fact, but it all added to the time she spent on me compared with if I had had a face to face appointment in the first place.

There's no doubt in my mind that the NHS needs a really good shake-up of managerial attitudes and a far more robust approach to weeding out highly incompetent practitioners/consultants/surgeons who often are protected and allowed to be let loose on unfortunate patients long after they should have been given their P45s. We keep on hearing about scandals where malpractice has been swept under the carpet, such as the maternity ward scandal at Shrewsbury and Telford hospitals reported in 2019 and the Stafford hospital scandal reported in the same year - in the latter case the hospital seems to have been more like a publicly-funded torture chamber where management and staff got away with mistreating patients for years before the malpractice was exposed. In every case we are given the bland platitude that lessons will be learned blah blah blah but the fact that these scandals keep on happening shows that lessons are not learned.

All this undermines the work of dedicated nurses and clinicians like STPD and I get annoyed about that.

As a parting shot, every so often I read about malpractice in the private sector - auditors from big firms who fail to notice that the companies they are auditing like Carillion are heading for the knacker's yard, or banks whose boards regularly find new ways of destroying shareholder value and have to be bailed out by the taxpayer, or tobacco companies who sought to downplay and discredit research that showed that their products are bad for your health. Or indeed the recent scandal about the duff accountancy software which led to hundreds of sub Post Officers being wrongly accused of fraud etc and having their lives wrecked while the leading managers who presided over this debacle have AFAIK received no sanction or punishment at all. Am I to conclude that all of the people who run the private sector are like this? :devil
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by Furby »

Its whats easiest for whose organising things then. The system as it is does seem to constantly fit the pattern of making things more difficult for patients. I am sorry if STPD is upset by my comment and some individuals are indeed good people but the NHS system is beyond bad and more money isnt helping it. Thats been tried every year for 70 years and every year its worse.

COVID vaccines were a example of what I mean by whats best for the staff. Old and disabled people needed to be vaccinated first so they set up a system where appointments had to be pre booked online and patients travel miles to football grounds and queue for hours with no toilets. It was easier to organise. Later on when volume targets were set they opened slightly more local appointments and then even later when they needed to get the under 30s to meet their targets they opened up walk ins and really local appointments. It was the wrong way round and why under 30s had it made easier for them when they were most able to book online and travel anyway made no logical sense.

I got annoyed they hadnt told me that if I waited until they were up to the under 30s I could get an easier appointment. I would have just stayed in to avoid covid until then.
For the boosters my area is back to the middle way of slightly more local appointments. Probably as our area didnt have a football super hub anyway. There arent vaccines ANY at local GPs even though previously they always did the flu vaccines.

The plan to help with GP appointments is to have better phone systems. I suppose this will mean the phone system tells you after an hour that all appointments for the day are gone and try again tomorrow. That way no one shouts at the receptionist.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by Furby »

How is the flu vaccine working ? Do you just have to find a local chemist and see if they can do it. Previously the GP used to do the flu vaccines themselves but now they don't and the local nhs area places are covid only. The flu vaccination system was an established system already set up and working and flu hasn't gone away it doesn't really make sense to abandon it to only do covid vaccines.

Medically only over 65s needed flu vaccine and when covid hit they were actually ringing me saying why haven't you been in and was because I asked and they said over 65s only then they changed rules. So because covid is here why are under 65s more likely to get flu makes no sense.

Covid rates are coming down a bit now so maybe it was a queen's funeral and schools back peak. I still don't understand where the figures are from since most tests aren't logged with NHS now. It doesn't seem that bad among working people if they can work with covid because you really can't work with flu it's not a choice however old you are so flu is worse than covid.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by merry »

You can book one online at a Tesco who offers the service, and if Tesco do it, presumably Boots or similar do too. I looked into it for Juliet. I think it was £20.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by eccles »

I got my flu vaccine in Boots. It was done for nothing because I am over 65. It was a much nicer experience than previous occasions at the local GP surgery, less rushed and delivered by a nice chatty pharmacist. At the surgery it was like a cattle market.
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Post by Patience »

I received both my flu and COVID jags on Wednesday night at the local health centre. It’s around 400m from my front door, so there is no problems getting there. No issues with the jags either.
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Post by merry »

Hope that protects you from both, Patience :hugs
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Post by Furby »

We have them as different appointments and even different staff and locations here so I only had the flu first. I see flu as a bigger danger because I have had flu and been really struggling even to get a drink for myself. People with covid are well enough to go to work. I have had symptoms of snuffy and runny nose ever since first vaccine since so need to recover from that before getting anything else. There's no testing now but I don't think snuffy nose is symptom of covid or flu is it. Rest of me feels fine so far. Part of me wants to go out and sneakily (try to) breathe out my mask on the tram because no one on trams minds catching anything but I didn't despite I really need to get to bank to get hundreds of pounds more next year.

Care homes are being told they must allow visitors in even if there are outbreaks and even without visitors being tested so it does look as though the medical people no longer see covid as dangerous any more. After all the fuss over original covid and care homes they wouldn't encourage infections just as we head into winter would they.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by OurCreature »

As to care homes KW, and the rest of Brendoncare AFAIK, hasn't required visitors to be tested for some time. I think they have to wear masks if they are visiting residents in the Court ie my lot but these are provided by KW. Volunteers and staff have to wear masks when interacting with residents, but we test only if we are unwell and think it might be covid. So far KW hasn't had any problems with covid under the latest non-testing regime.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by Furby »

I went into town today as I needed to go to banks that make me go into town because they closed all the others . Literally noone except me was wearing a mask on the tram despite it being half full of elderly people and constant coughing. In town I only saw two Chinese people in masks and one other man near the Xmas markets who might have been a robber rather than health conscious. It was a quieter time of day and no one shouted at me for being mask face so that was good. So it looks as though that's it's for covid. Not in china though they are back to barricading people in infected suburbs.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by TRavine »

Same here. Seems like people have given up on masks entirely. In Vienna they are still compulsory on public transport, but about 50% of people still don't wear them and there don't seem to be any noteworthy consequences.

I wear a mask on public transport and whenever I'm indoors, when there are a lot of people around (the mall, supermarkets, the theatre,...). I went to a concert two weeks ago with a couple of thousand people, and I was literally the only person with a mask there! Makes me wonder how everyone can be so careless.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by eccles »

There are a couple of noteworthy variants on the rise, one that is taking hold in western countries, the other in the east. The good new from the one in the east is that it is 30% less likely to cause hospitalisation than the current omicron variants. If the western one follows the same path, Covid could be following the usual virus path of endemic but largely benign esistence.
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Corona - sounds like a fizzy drink but not nice (COVID)

Post by Wildrover »

Little Miss Wildrover has come down with COVID for the third time - she just got back from a 3 week lecture tour in Thailand and Cambodia last week and thinks she must have got it on the plane journey on Thursday. She only found out by taking a mandatory test for lecturers before being allowed to return to lecturing - apparently standard practice for Cambridge. She said she's a litle tired but that may be the jetlag - aside from that she is symptomless. So it does seem that it is becoming less serious - alhough LMW is only 30 and on her third bout which is in her favour.
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Post by Furby »

There is now strep a which is killing children. I don't understand the lockdown caused it because if those children were the unfortunate ones dying of disease wouldn't they just have died 2 years earlier if had been allowed to mix and catch diseases earlier?

And diphtheria is being brought in by the migrants. We are told this is ok because UK are vaccinated as children but if we are expected to believe covid vaccines only work for 6 months if that how can a dipteheria vaccine last 60 years. I don't even know what vaccines I had because pre computers they didn't keep records. When I had a bad reaction to one my mum said no more so I didn't get all available ones for my age.

What I did notice about all these diseases covid strep diphtheria etc is that they al have symptoms of colds and flu. So as we are not routinely tested for anything and used to be told it's just a virus even if seeking help as it seemed a very very bad cold how do the health people know who had what and if it's got worse. Even flu isn't tested for so how do they know cases are rising this year only covid has ever had population testing. Unless you are in hospital no one knows what you might have until you die of it. And even then old people get old age put on death certificates like my granny and the queen.
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