It’s really interesting reading this from the POV of a doctor in the UK. I see patients every few weeks or so who haved moved from the US, and their expectations of the health system are hilarious to me. But reading this makes me notice how much I’ve basically adjusted my expectations to a level of pretty substandard (in some sense) care—in that I expect that quite a lot of the time we just cannot figure out the answer to a problem, or help someone’s symptoms. Whether to call this substandard I’m not sure—I don’t know what % of those cases actually are solvable at the moment; but I do “give up” on finding a cause, not that infrequently, this is accepted practice among my colleagues. I had mostly until now thought of this as a consequence of the UK healthcare system (ie very overstretched, rationed care, specialists rejecting referrals from me unless the symptoms are really a certain level of bad, medicines not be ‘allowed’ on our local formulary because of cost, the incentive each day to be quick because of having 30 appointments squeezed into a day) - but this post makes me realise perhaps the NHS specific causes are only part of the issue.
It’s really interesting reading this from the POV of a doctor in the UK. I see patients every few weeks or so who haved moved from the US, and their expectations of the health system are hilarious to me. But reading this makes me notice how much I’ve basically adjusted my expectations to a level of pretty substandard (in some sense) care—in that I expect that quite a lot of the time we just cannot figure out the answer to a problem, or help someone’s symptoms. Whether to call this substandard I’m not sure—I don’t know what % of those cases actually are solvable at the moment; but I do “give up” on finding a cause, not that infrequently, this is accepted practice among my colleagues. I had mostly until now thought of this as a consequence of the UK healthcare system (ie very overstretched, rationed care, specialists rejecting referrals from me unless the symptoms are really a certain level of bad, medicines not be ‘allowed’ on our local formulary because of cost, the incentive each day to be quick because of having 30 appointments squeezed into a day) - but this post makes me realise perhaps the NHS specific causes are only part of the issue.