UK Healthcare System in Crisis: Difficulty in Finding Doctors, Telemedicine Overloads Emergency Rooms
British families have encountered many major problems after the epidemic. Among them, the difficulty of finding a doctor is the most criticized. In addition, telemedicine has become the norm, and the outpatient service is difficult to wait, which has caused a large increase in emergency patients. Everyone complains again and again .
In the UK, waiting for more than one month to see a doctor is a common phenomenon across the country. It is even more difficult for specialist doctors to wait. Patients often wait for more than half a year, and there are even hundreds of thousands of people who wait for more than one year. According to a poll in the UK a few days ago, more than half of the people are aware of their health problems, but less than 30% actually go to see a doctor. Another more than 30% of the people said that after failing to register, they simply gave up seeing a doctor passively, which shows that the entire medical problem has seriously affected the public’s right to see a doctor.
Not only is it difficult for adults to seek medical treatment, but children’s delay in seeing a doctor is also becoming more and more serious. The survey of more than 2,000 people showed that about 30% of British people can only pray that their illness will recover automatically because they cannot make an appointment to see a doctor. The general strike of medical personnel in the United Kingdom that started at the beginning of the year has dragged on for more than half a year, making the difficulty of finding a doctor even worse.
〈Non-health insurance〉If you are sick, you don’t get medical treatment. There is a shortage of manpower
Recent new data from the UK show that as many as 15,000 sick children had their surgeries postponed or canceled last year, and about 4,000 of them were due to lack of hospital beds, an increase of nearly 60% over the previous year. About 3,000 people were forced to postpone due to lack of medical staff, an increase of 52% over the previous year. Some children have been delayed for several years, seriously affecting the health of the next generation in the UK, and causing additional burdens for many families.
The new survey, which received data from just 77 health care foundations, already shows that nearly 60,000 surgeries have been canceled for children since 2018, and the numbers are actually much larger. In addition to the lack of beds or medical manpower to cancel the operation is the main reason, over-registration on the day of the operation and lack of operating tables are also one of the factors.
Parents with sick children are under the greatest pressure, because they must ask for leave or make other arrangements for other children and work in order to accompany the operation, including the psychological construction of the operation patient. Once the operation is postponed or canceled, the entire arrangement will also be affected. The crash, frustration, and disappointment came immediately.
The surgical situation of sick children after the epidemic has not improved. Experts believe that this will do the most harm to sick children, because some surgeries need to be performed at a certain age to be effective. Waiting too long and missing this critical period will have a lifetime of harm to the patient. health effects, both physical and psychological.
In the absence of outpatient clinics, remote consultations have become the norm in Britain after the epidemic. If you do not pass this level, it is quite difficult to see the outpatient clinics of physical doctors. Some patients made several phone calls from the beginning to the end, and did not even see the doctor after receiving the medicine.
The older generation of British people are not used to this kind of medical consultation. As a result, a large number of people who want to see a doctor flood into the emergency room to compete with emergency patients for doctors. Emergency patients have to wait for more than 10 hours before they can get a diagnosis, and some even have to wait to see a doctor. Wait 24 hours.
However, young people are quick to get used to remote medical consultation, and even think it is much more affordable than the previous physical consultation. Some consultation software requires online registration, and then uploads photos of symptoms. After the doctor diagnoses online, as long as the prescription is written on the same system, the patient can receive the medicine at a pharmacy near his home. Some consultation software can also specify whether to consult an AI doctor about symptoms or make an appointment with a real doctor.
Remote consultations in the UK have been deployed before the epidemic, and telephone consultations are the most common. After the epidemic, the government invested more resources to upgrade the computers and other equipment of grassroots outpatient clinics. Clinicians are forced to learn to use hearing and online vision to make assessments at a distance. There is a metaphor that it is similar to the difference between online shopping and store shopping. Doctors must judge which diseases can be diagnosed online and which ones should be visited in person. Come to judge.
