What happened on 30th March 2023

On Thursday the UK Prime Minister expressed his concern about schools no informing parents on gender issues regarding their children. 

Teachers among redditors disagree with him:

"Speaking as someone who was a youth worker for over ten years, this is an incredibly shit policy. 

Informing parents of things like this by default is dangerous. Some parents have incredibly strict points of view, particularly where religion is involved. Given information like this about gender, or sexuality, can lead to some parents taking harmful action towards their children, which in the worst cases can be tantamount to abuse. 

No one should ever be legally obliged to out a child to someone if it may put the child at risk." - "Agree completely. I'm a teacher and part of standard safeguarding policy is to ensure that no harm to them occurs at home as well as school. 

What this practically means is that if a student discloses something and also mentions that it will make their parents angry if they find out, we will now be expected to inform the parents before sending the student home.

At the moment, we don't send kids home alone if they have made a disclosure that suggests they are in danger of harm at home.

So this basically puts us in a position where most school's safeguarding policies are essentially now illegal.

I'm actually amazed at how impressively stupid this government are. I feel that the law of averages means that they should occasionally make a not stupid decision, but they seem to be doing everything they can to make sure that doesn't happen.

This feels very culture war-y to me."

Another big topic of Thursday was that half of Britons who needed to see a GP recently didn’t or couldn't do so. 

 The majority of comments were some shared bitter experiences like "I had surgery a year or two ago because I couldn't get a gp appointment. Small infection became massive infection became a&e became 20 or so appointments at the hospital and finally surgery. So glad my gp won't take phonecalls at all. Cost the NHS a ton in the end."

 Readers particularly noted access to mental health services and their efficiency.

 "access to mental health services can be even harder, which seems like it could be an issue given current economic circumstances!

i know myself i was referred (urgently) back in June, finally had the triage appointment in October but they decided my problems were a bit outside that services remit, so they shuffled me to a different service… had that triage appointment this month but i’d actually recovered a little since then so was no longer eligible for their services… referred back to the previous provider and they rejected it so no mental health help for me!

not entirely relevant i know but needed the rant, it amazes me how little help there is available when there’s so many posters encouraging MH awareness, it’s window dressing nothing more"

 

"Mental Health services are an absolute shit show. I changed address and whereas I was with a CMHT, still adjusting meds and such, after moving to my new GP I was told my referral to see a psychiatrist was refused by the local service. I was like... What?... How can they just refuse to see me? I was in the middle of something with the previous psychiatrist, doesn't make any sense."

 

There also were POV from the other side:

 

"Just a bit of insight on this one - a lot of NHS services outside of the main hospitals are run by third parties commissioned by local health authorities (clinical commissioning groups, integrated care boards, etc). The authorities have to compete for funding.

The health authorities each set their own criteria for which patients should or shouldn't be seen under those contracts as a way of keeping budgets under control. If funds are tight, they'll get stricter about what patients can be seen - basically reducing the number of patients they need to fund. It's very likely that's why the new provider wouldn't see you - they likely weren't *allowed* to under the terms of their commission."

"I work in one of these commissioned services and it's not just funding, or I suppose it is, it's capacity. We have been inundated with referrals and tightened up our criteria to only treat those most in need. If we had more funding we could increase clinical staff head count and treat more, have shorter waiting times (though our service is time-critical so ours are shorter than most)... What decides who gets funding? That's all down to the NHS long term plan and what the flavour of the month is. Our service operates in the current flavour of the month, has treated many more clients than was originally planned, transformed lives, is designed and run hyper-efficiently, and nobody knows if we will still exist past next May because that's when our funding runs out.

I see an argument for the nhs to go back to core services and stop getting involved in obscure things, but then again, who doesn't want everybody to be healed. Everybody's suffering matters.

I see loads of wastage in the NHS. I never worked anywhere but the private sector until this role, and the way the nhs operates is insane, largely due to all the meetings, many of which will have 10-20 staff from different services in attendance (because there is sod all cross-communication generally so meetings are the only way people hear about things that overlap different services), and absolutely nothing comes out of the meetings. They just talk and talk round in circles with no direction or decision making. It's demotivating."

On Thursday we also learned that tens of billions of pounds have been lost to fraud since the start of the COVID pandemic, according to the National Audit Office (NAO), with little chance of the majority being reclaimed, 

 

Opinions on this subject divided. Some users were interested in "how many billions are resting in the accounts of Tory donors." 

Others didn't see any crime in it. "Technically not fraud. Missmanagement certainly." - "It's only fraud when poor people do it."

 Well, even if it cannot be considered a fraud officially, that is another Tory drop into the British cup of patience.