NHS logic…

[bobinho]

Get this. Had me baffled all day this….

I noticed last night my usual direct debit to the NHS hadn’t been taken since Jan… it’s only £11 so I just didn’t notice, like I don’t notice most things. It’s to pay my prescription fees up front.
Rings up the helpline to explain that I hadn’t cancelled it, it just stopped being claimed.
“That’s right” says the girl, “because you turn 60 this year, we stop the DD in preparation for you paying nothing when 60.”
“But I owe you from Jan, because I’ve been getting my prescriptions. Can I pay for the year now from Jan until December, then I’m covered - I don’t want owt for nowt, it’s a mistake?”
“No, you can only pay from June. If you get caught in the sweep from Jan to June as fraudulently getting a repeat prescription, you’ll be prosecuted and fined.”
“But you cancelled the DD, not me…I just want to pay it!”
“You can’t. You can plead mitigating circumstances to get a lighter fine if you get pulled. You might not get pulled though…”
“But YOU stopped claiming the DD!!!”
“Yeah, it’s just how we do it…”

I was reyt enough with the lass, not her rules, but I was (and still am) quite frustrated. What a strange way to do business…

Anyone have any experience of this, or any NHS insiders who can make this sound logical?

[tarkys_ears]

Remember to bang your pots and pans in celebration...

[alwaysaclaret]

Same as everything else in the NHS, not working, system wise I mean.

[Roosterbooster]

I'm not entirely sure I believe any of this conversation

[Rick_Muller]

I'm not entirely sure I believe any of this conversation

Completely legit. Exactly the same situation happened to me, except I’m not 60. They stopped my DD, and I had no idea until I check the following month bank statement. I called up and was told the exact same thing, if I get caught I’ll be prosecuted for fraud, and they did exactly that. I can’t remember the exact fine I had to pay, but it was at least a couple of hundred quid.

I complained for 18 months to fight it, but got nowhere as it’s our responsibility to check we are not using an expired Pre Payment certificate.

[Roosterbooster]

Surely there's a lawyer on here that can clarify if it's actually fraud when you're trying to pay

I can't imagine any sane judge would let this go

Makes absolutely no sense

[whiffa]

All you need to do is record your conversation on the phone (and tell them you're doing so), then you've got evidence if it ever came to them trying to fine you - that you tried your best to pay and they wouldn't let you. They then wouldn't be able to uphold any fine.

[Roosterbooster]

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/ ... 0-fine-for

Absolutely idiotic

Although the lawer statement at the bottom seems to suggest that the NHSBSA has breached contract law by cancelling the DD without your explicit permission- so I guess you're backed up by the law as well as common sense

[Cardclaret]

Did they say pay the pharmacy when you pick up your prescription.

[taio]

Prescription prepayment certificates, assuming that's what this is about, expire after three or 12 months. Paying by DD may enable automatic renewal, but there are exceptions, including if you're turning 60 within 9 months of your certificate expiring. So you will either need to renew or pay for prescriptions individually.

[Burnley1989]

Wait until the rest of the UK realises the majority of the nurses qualifying each year havent even a job to go to once theyve finished uni and training.

Youd be disgusted if you knew how many just walk away because theyve no jobs whilst we are told theres a shortage of nurses. Its ok, we can just pay bank nurses twice as much to fill the gaps.
The NHS has never been in such a mess.

[Anonymous Claret]

Wait until the rest of the UK realises the majority of the nurses qualifying each year havent even a job to go to once theyve finished uni and training.

Youd be disgusted if you knew how many just walk away because theyve no jobs whilst we are told theres a shortage of nurses. Its ok, we can just pay bank nurses twice as much to fill the gaps.
The NHS has never been in such a mess.

I can't help but think it's a deliberate ploy by successive governments, whatever the party to run the NHS into the ground.
Even though many services within the NHS are already outsourced it's only a matter of time before it is fully privatised.

[Burnley1989]

I can't help but think it's a deliberate ploy by successive governments, whatever the party to run the NHS into the ground.
Even though many services within the NHS are already outsourced it's only a matter of time before it is fully privatised.

Youre probably not wrong, its 100x worse than most are aware, and far too late to fix it now.

[Anonymous Claret]

Remember to bang your pots and pans in celebration...

This was 1 of the moments that made me look down the rabbit hole and start to see the world with different eyes.
Whilst the fat, lying PM was 'dying' in hospital with a runny nose and the 'exhausted' nurses were performing their choreographed Tik Tok dance routines in empty hospitals every Thursday at 7.00pm the clapping seals performed their weekly ritual.

[Bacchus]

Setting aside some of the COVID sceptic BS and treating that with the disdain it deserves, a lot of the remarks on here around the lack of general organisation within the NHS seem reasonable based on my experience.

So the next time we hear the traditional complaints about too much money going to pen pushers and 'bosses' let's have a think about who is actually responsible for getting the administrative part of the organisation working effectively and maybe accept that it can't just be made up solely of doctors and nurses.

[Guller Bull]

This was 1 of the moments that made me look down the rabbit hole and start to see the world with different eyes.
Whilst the fat, lying PM was 'dying' in hospital with a runny nose and the 'exhausted' nurses were performing their choreographed Tik Tok dance routines in empty hospitals every Thursday at 7.00pm the clapping seals performed their weekly ritual.

That’s brilliant and just about sums up the madness of the time!

[Bob Lorder]

Get this. Had me baffled all day this….

I noticed last night my usual direct debit to the NHS hadn’t been taken since Jan… it’s only £11 so I just didn’t notice, like I don’t notice most things. It’s to pay my prescription fees up front.
Rings up the helpline to explain that I hadn’t cancelled it, it just stopped being claimed.
“That’s right” says the girl, “because you turn 60 this year, we stop the DD in preparation for you paying nothing when 60.”
“But I owe you from Jan, because I’ve been getting my prescriptions. Can I pay for the year now from Jan until December, then I’m covered - I don’t want owt for nowt, it’s a mistake?”
“No, you can only pay from June. If you get caught in the sweep from Jan to June as fraudulently getting a repeat prescription, you’ll be prosecuted and fined.”
“But you cancelled the DD, not me…I just want to pay it!”
“You can’t. You can plead mitigating circumstances to get a lighter fine if you get pulled. You might not get pulled though…”
“But YOU stopped claiming the DD!!!”
“Yeah, it’s just how we do it…”

I was reyt enough with the lass, not her rules, but I was (and still am) quite frustrated. What a strange way to do business…

Anyone have any experience of this, or any NHS insiders who can make this sound logical?

Same happened to me last year, ended up with a £100 fine ( think it was £100 ) for claiming a prescription without paying ... I've always done pre payment, couldn't understand it ... rang them & ended up paying the month I'd missed .. All good now, but what a crazy system they have, they know when we turn 60, so avoidable ...

[bobinho]

I'm not entirely sure I believe any of this conversation

Well that didn’t age well…

[Roosterbooster]

Well that didn’t age well…

You've got to admit

It doesn't sound believable

[Tall Paul]

Seems pretty logical to me.

The PPC is for a 12 month period so, as prescriptions are free once you turn 60, it isn't automatically renewed to avoid you paying for something you don't need. I would imagine you'll have received an email to let you know it wasn't being renewed.

[bobinho]

You've got to admit

It doesn't sound believable

Had I heard it from someone else, I would’ve doubted it too…. But I heard it first hand. Slept on it and it’s STILL bizarre…

[bobinho]

Seems pretty logical to me.

The PPC is for a 12 month period so, as prescriptions are free once you turn 60, it isn't automatically renewed to avoid you paying for something you don't need. I would imagine you'll have received an email to let you know it wasn't being renewed.

And if it automatically cut out and stopped drawing it when you turn 60, you’d have a point. It stopped 10 months before I turn 60, and I do still need the prescription.
I don’t have to reset all my other DD’s every year, so I wrongly assumed I had nothing to do with it so I relaxed, thinking my prescriptions were paid for.
I imagine I DID receive an email… as I normally get NOTHING from the NHS, it may well have gone into spam or junk, so wouldn’t be read. I certainly didn't get a snail mail confirmation.

[Terrier]

A lot of money for the all ready rich to be made by making the nhs unusable, let's make it private eh?

[Tall Paul]

And if it automatically cut out and stopped drawing it when you turn 60, you’d have a point. It stopped 10 months before I turn 60, and I do still need the prescription.
I don’t have to reset all my other DD’s every year, so I wrongly assumed I had nothing to do with it so I relaxed, thinking my prescriptions were paid for.
I imagine I DID receive an email… as I normally get NOTHING from the NHS, it may well have gone into spam or junk, so wouldn’t be read. I certainly didn't get a snail mail confirmation.

You'll get a new certificate by email every year, if it's going into your spam that's your own fault for not telling your email service that it isn't.

The mistake you're making is treating it as a monthly fee but it's actually an annual fee with the payments spread over 12 months like your season ticket or road tax. If they took full payment from people when they're eligible for free prescriptions I'm sure there would be complaints.

[durhamclaret]

Like most of the administration and organisation in the NHS, not fit for purpose.
*iss up in a brewery comes to mind.

[Inchy]

This was 1 of the moments that made me look down the rabbit hole and start to see the world with different eyes.
Whilst the fat, lying PM was 'dying' in hospital with a runny nose and the 'exhausted' nurses were performing their choreographed Tik Tok dance routines in empty hospitals every Thursday at 7.00pm the clapping seals performed their weekly ritual.

As someone who worked as a critical care nurse through covid I will give you my thoughts.

The hospital was deserted at first prior to the first wave hitting. Patients stayed at home, some when they shouldn’t. A and E was empty, some should have come, and no doubt the time wasters found some other way to fill their day. That’s when all those videos of empty hospitals were taken.

It was during this period the tiktok dances started. I know a few ICU nurses that did one. This was all prior to the first wave. I thought it was stupid at the time, but these are very young adults who are not always the most mature.

Once the wave hit it got very busy. Not across the whole hospital, the cancer wards were kept ‘clean’ and ‘protected’ but a lot of the cancer patients stayed at home out of fear. Wards that were usually surgical or elder medical wards were now packed with covid patients. ICU was full. There’s about 35 ICU beds where I worked. About 80% of those beds were filled with covid patients. Beds usually needed for liver transplants, post op wipples etc were now full. The whole theatre suite was flipped to accommodate covid patients.

When the first wave ended things got quiet but the government policy was keep things for covid. When the second wave came it was the same as the first. I saw one of those tiktok dancing nurses having a breakdown, couldn’t cope, too much death. I thought “oh you’re not dancing around now like a prat are you”. Mean I know but I was fed up with some of the behaviour of NHS staff. Some doctors in specialities no longer working during the waves just went home, even though there skills could have been used in ICU. Not all though. I know one particular gastro consultant that was working as a bedside ICU nurse during the first wave.
Non clinical managers just disappeared but received every little shite benefit aimed for clinical staff. Prime example, just before the first wave when things got locked down, local restaurants sent food to the hospital for the clinical staff at the coal
Face.

All the food was taken by non clinical staff from trust HQ. Wankers.

The third wave just lingered on for months and wasn’t really a wave. Just ticked along in the background as a pain

Before covid as a baseline I used to always think people were good at heart. Not selfish. After Covid as a baseline I assume people are selfish pricks until proven otherwise

I’m working on it

[ClaretPete001]

As someone who worked as a critical care nurse through covid I will give you my thoughts.

The hospital was deserted at first prior to the first wave hitting. Patients stayed at home, some when they shouldn’t. A and E was empty, some should have come, and no doubt the time wasters found some other way to fill their day. That’s when all those videos of empty hospitals were taken.

(Cut down for brevity.)

I spent several weeks in hospital with Covid. Effectively my lungs started to pack in and I couldn't breathe.

I won't go through the idiocy of the experience because I doubt some on here could ideologically bring themselves to believe it but what did shock me was the level of violence against the nursing staff. After several weeks in isolation I was eventually put on a Covid ward, which is where the fun began.

The staff were punched, kicked hit with those things, which raise the beds up or down - screamed and swore at and had food thrown at them. They endured it with indomitable calm, which I thought bordered on madness. I felt sorry for them. Ultimately, I doubt I would be here without the NHS but it was a sobering experience.

[JR1882]

Totally bizarre organisation, if even a fraction of what happens in the NHS happened in a private business it would be shut down in disgrace.

[GetIntoEm]

The NHS is a mess, my wife works in a quite senior non clinical role and sees it regularly, constant restructures to save money and resources just result in more wasted cost and high band roles as the NHS is incapable or getting rid of incompetent staff who don't perform. They literally shift them to other roles on the same banding or sometimes higher if the structure is easier to fill.

It's crazy. If it was a private sector company those people would be out of work.

On the clinical side it's a mixture of people with the best intentions, and those who just want to moan about their chosen career path. The moaners being the ones who dont do their fair share, and leave the harder working ones stressed and broken. Again there is a culture of acceptance, the culture that the NHS is broken so why should they try harder.

The comments about covid above mirror out experience too, my wife regularly had to stop at home not doing much when she could have used her skills to support the effort, but there was no desire from the NHS to use them. She regularly came home with bags full of food that had been donated as they couldn't organise getting it to the front line and used to let trust HQs just take it home.

The media and certain NHS staff tried to whip up this super hero mentality, which empowered some to an incredible level. Those videos of neighbours clapping people as they got into their car to work.

I hope we never have to go through that rubbish again

We are fortunate enough that our family can go private should we need any treatment's these days, and the experience is chalk and cheese.

Bit of a ramble but something that I'm passionate about after having many close family working/abused by the NHS over the last 50 years.

On the topic of prescriptions, I was recently fined. Tesco pharmacy gave my prescription to a family member with an exemption card by mistake. Fine came through, challenged it, they agreed to cancel. Took 6 months for them to resolve despite numerous calls, letters, emails. Incredible system. I believe the above story

[wilks_bfc]

On the flip side of all this, I pay for any prescriptions I need, but mrs_w is exempt.

The last time I needed to collect in for myself, the pharmacy handed it over then walked away before I paid.
I called them back to say “I need to pay” and they replied, no you don’t you have an exemption card.
“No I don’t, my wife does”
“Not what the system says”
“Well the system is wrong, can I please pay?”

It took far longer then it should have done to convince them I wanted to pay, and the queue behind me was getting annoyed at me for holding them up, with many telling me to just leave without paying

[GetIntoEm]

Even when they fined me by mistake they had no way of me paying the prescription fee, they just let me have it for free

[Inchy]

The NHS needs radical reform…..what that looks like I have no idea.

As a rule I’m not one for privatisation, however certain areas such as IT should be privatised with performance related bonuses/extra payments

I worked on a project in my old trust that involved the IT and finance department.

Anyone half decent at IT left. I knew several people that used health education England funding to fund their masters degrees, and then they left on completion for double the money. Let’s face it if you are a whiz at coding or project management you can earn far more in the private sector. So the nhs is left with a handful of altruistic people, and a lot of people that wouldn’t last 5 minutes in the private sector.
I remember seeing a 8b (60-70k) senior project manager watch a full episode of Eastenders at work. She was pretending to work but I could see her iPad reflecting in the window behind her

General management is the same. I remember I once attended a finance meeting. The first thing that struck me was the amount of people in attendance. Over 100 members of staff. The second was how much must this meeting cost to put on.

This meeting was done quarterly. At the first meeting the director of finance (no doubt an accountant by trade) laid out how we were going to make a 6million profit this year. At the next meeting we were already 6 million in the red, that’s during the summer months as well. She stood there with a straight face and said “I think we can turn this round” and laid out some nonsensical way to do this.

She knew she was talking ********. She’s not a moron, but if she doesn’t say we can turn it round she will be replaced by someone that can. Very senior management are like politicians going round shaking hands trying to pretend everything is ok, when they no it isn’t, but if they admit that they will be replaced.

[Bacchus]

Very senior management are like politicians going round shaking hands trying to pretend everything is ok, when they no it isn’t, but if they admit that they will be replaced.

To be fair this is no different in the private sector, at least once an organisation reaches a certain size.

[Rick_Muller]

As someone who worked as a critical care nurse through covid I will give you my thoughts.

...

Logged in specifically to just say thank you for everything you did during the pandemic, and continue to do now

[Inchy]

To be fair this is no different in the private sector, at least once an organisation reaches a certain size.

I’m more pi55ed off I spelt know wrong but wouldn’t let me edit. In my defence I’m using a smashed iPhone and have marmite on the screen from breakfast

[ClaretPete001]

To be fair this is no different in the private sector, at least once an organisation reaches a certain size.

I also agree with this once you get to the billion dollar size you get the same types running the business. Tick box merchants largely Accountants and Sales/Marketing types who very quickly destroy the culture that created the success in the first place.

In my case, I was taken into hospital with Covid but refused treatment because a consultant decided there was nothing wrong with me. They sent me home even though by Gov't guidelines meant I would have to go straight back because my oxygen levels were so low.

I had a physio trying to prove I was fit by asking me to walk around my bed: I couldn't but they sent me home anyway. A day later I was emergency ambulanced back to Hospital and spent several weeks in isolation.

To be fair, once I was in the system and on the wards I had no complaints.

[HurstGrangeClaret]

This really does make depressing reading.
Didn’t Labour have some kind of intention to reform the NHS?
I’m not going to hold my breath this will happen when you consider what’s happening at the moment.