Det skal ikke snakkes om, tvert om. Det britiske helsevesenet nærmer seg kollaps, men hvorfor dette skjer, skal ikke diskuteres. Man peker heller på «eldrebølgen» (som i og for seg er en realitet), skriver den kjente journalisten og kommentatoren Katie Hopkins.
They blame the elderly. They talk about how the population is ageing, and of the increasingly complex needs of the ageing (which, of course, is perfectly true).
They insist that the NHS is dependent on its migrant staff, that a fluid labor force is the only way the NHS can sustain itself.
(…)
They talk of their dismay at Tory politicians for not giving them more cash.
50 000 operasjoner er avlyst i januar.
Britain’s nationalized Health Service, the NHS, is close to collapse. You’ve seen the headlines over recent days – the service is desperately sick. In fact, 12 NHS Trusts have reached a state of emergency. 50,000 operations will be cancelled in January to try to ease the pressure.
Krisen handler ført og fremst om ukontrollert innvandring fra 3. verden, fortsetter Hopkins, som har klart å få en lege (GP, fastlege), under lovnad om anonymitet, til å fortelle om forholdene.
But one brave GP is determined to speak out. Deluged by new patients, inundated with demands for sick notes, threatened with physical violence, his service used shamelessly to game the welfare and healthcare system, he has had enough of the silencing.
He speaks to me in confidence, refuses a photo; he tells me if his peers identify him they will force him from his job.
Hva denne legen beskriver er så forstemmende at vi gjengir alt i sin helhet. Vi har dessuten fra flere hold innen det norske helsevesenet hørt om liknende forhold: trusler fra pasienter, spill for å få diagnoser og lange sykemeldinger, og pasientgrupper med lange og urimelige kravlister som spiser opp tiden til andre, trengende pasienter.
We’ve been working together over the last few months. He has helped me unravel what it is that is crippling our NHS, and diagnose the sickness that the BMA, the Royal College of General Practitioners, senior medics and political insiders refuse to acknowledge.
On the front line of healthcare, frustrated by his daily routine, this general practitioner sees a very different truth to the one that is publicly peddled. He is overwhelmed by new arrivals and their demands.
Not in a medical sense. He stresses repeatedly, if anyone is sick he is there to treat them, no matter what. (I reassure him that he doesn’t need to say this; then I remember the hostility shown to me by clinicians supporting “Remain”).
Jo is overwhelmed by the fact that new arrivals into the UK have worked out the welfare and immigration system in advance, and shamelessly use GPs to play it.
He looks at his work diary, filled back-to-back with people demanding sick notes formalizing reasons they cannot work. These people are clear about the time-period the note must cover and quick to anger if Jo fails to comply.
He tries to limit these sick notes to three months, but most insist on longer and refuse to leave until he gives them what they expect – permission not to work, or look for work.
He tells me he has been threatened repeatedly, both inside and outside work. One patient in his consulting room threatened to punch him; an angry patient told another GP colleague he would be “waiting for him outside at the end of his shift.”
Jo tells me this kind of story is repeated in doctors’ offices up and down the country wherever migrants live.
Migrants are gaming the immigration system by logging illnesses and conditions. They believe the more illnesses they accumulate on file, the stronger their claim to residence in the UK and the less likely they are to be turned away.
They visit the surgery repeatedly, accumulating conditions like credits to cash-in. And they know which conditions are impossible to disprove.
Jo notes, ruefully, that any welfare claimant or migrant worth their salt will have at minimum, backache and depression / stress on their file as standard.
Other appointment slots are filled with patients demanding letters to support benefit applications or appeals and to address council (welfare) housing demands; usually requests for better accommodation based on health “needs.”
Some even expect Jo to write a letter exempting them from the British citizenship test.
Migrants have been advised that amenable doctors sympathetic to new arrivals will write a letter exempting them from sitting the test on the grounds they are not physically able to do so.
Jo says the NHS is regularly used for this service.
Too often the person in front of him has completely failed to integrate, has made no effort to learn English, and clearly has no intention of trying to meet the standard required. Instead, they expect him to write them a doctor’s note to bypass the process.
Meanwhile the taxpayer pays for the doctor’s appointment and a translator in order that they can make this demand.
If the patient can’t get a diagnosis or sick note from Jo, and a marked illness on their file, they will shop around the practice’s other doctors to get what they want. Jo wonders whether it is better to just write the notes and save his colleagues further distraction. Or whether to stand up for his principles and refuse to diagnose or prescribe on-demand, and risk damaging relationships with his patients and his colleagues.
He could write the letter and charge a fee. But given the patient is already claiming welfare, invoicing is futile and only takes yet more money from a state already burdened by too many people.
Reflecting on my experiences with migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Libya, I ask Jo whether there is a cultural aspect to the problem.
In response, he compares two patients. One is an elderly gentleman who lost a limb during the D-Day landings in Normandy.
When he comes in for his appointment, his wife comes too, because otherwise he won’t say just how bad it is.
“I’m doing well, can’t complain, feeling good,” says the elderly man, all stiff upper lip and wanting to please.
His wife tells Jo that they have both been up all night, fighting to keep breath in his body, both certain he would drown because of fluid in his lungs.
Then Jo tells me of a recently arrived migrant, well coached by family and friends to game the system, already collecting conditions and notes on file, making continual demands.
“They know what they want: referrals, that consultant, this specialist, that medication,” says Jo.
“And they are determined to get it.”
”It’s curious. I know the system in the countries where these people are coming from. The countries are poor, there are too many people, the medical service is sketchy at best. The sheer volume of people means everyone is just a number. You get what you are given and you have to pay for it. But when people arrive here in the UK, they immediately see that the service is free, and campaign to get what they want.”
Most Brits, he says, understand that resources are limited and therefore there are waiting lists, and some services are no longer provided – varicose vein treatment, for example, except in the most dire of circumstances.
But recent arrivals will not even entertain this reality. They believe healthcare is not only their right, but is somehow owed to them on arrival despite never having paid into the system – as is campaigning for sick notes to avoid ever having to work.
He adds, as an aside, that the British young are much, much softer than the generations that came before: “they have zero tolerance of pain and can’t see beyond themselves,” he tells me.
This truth from a doctor makes me smile.
He is wise. And hearing his truths is somehow deeply reassuring; selfishly I find myself buoyed up at discovering there is still some sanity like Jo’s left inside the madness of the system.
But listening to him is heartbreaking, too, especially when you think about young doctors, going through medical college full of ambition to outsmart the human body, only to be thwarted by those whose only ambition is to outsmart a system ripe for exploitation.
Jo can’t speak out at work. His colleagues appear to have signed up to the accepted view that migration is good, Brexit is bad, and pensioners are to blame. There is curious militancy inside this organization designed to care.
He cannot believe that the NHS, an organization that claims to operate outside of politics, has become so political. Every publication and newsletter he receives from the BMA carries an anti-Brexit message or Brexit calamity story. He sends me examples.
“They are only apolitical when it suits them,” he says, resigned to keeping his own counsel at work.
Jo is a third-generation migrant. On June 24, after the Brexit vote, his colleagues appeared to be embarrassed to face him. They had bought into the charges of racism and xenophobia perpetuated by the Remainers and the left; they acted as if it were true that Brexit meant Britain had rejected all migrants.
Jo voted for Brexit. And he knows he is not alone.
He says there are legions of NHS-insiders, from management to GPs to nursing staff, who know that the real threat to the NHS is the sheer numbers resulting from recent migration. No system can take an annual population growth of half a million people a year from sustained migration and expect to cope, he explains.
And that’s if you try to convince yourself immigration figures are anything close to accurate. After the horrific fire that destroyed a towering block of council flats in London – Grenfell Tower – the discrepancy between actual resident numbers and estimated resident numbers, swollen by illegals, was stark.
Invisible people died because on paper they did not exist.
But doctors cannot speak out.
Instead, their voices are silenced. Silenced by peer pressure from colleagues, silenced by messaging from the union and the Royal College, and failed by management who cannot be honest about the problem because it is not politically expedient to do so.
In order to throw political support behind Labour and Remain, the NHS has to cover up its biggest problem and the disease that will eventually kill it: immigration.
They are no more wise than my dad. Except my dad covers up the truth of his ailing health because he has his family’s best interests at heart. The lie at the heart of the NHS is not motivated by good.
Instead it has a political agenda. There is only one accepted view. And there is a systemic cover-up of the truth about the war inside the health services, a cover-up enabled by left-leaning media who refuse to point out the obvious.
Ask any British patient waiting ten hours or more for emergency care, and they will be honest with you. They see there are simply too many people, too many who have not paid in – taking out.
On the front line, in the GP’s office, the cover-up translates as an endless fight over sick notes, doctors’ letters to support benefit appeals to get better housing or circumvent the citizenship test, and the on-file accrual of conditions in support of claims for welfare or asylum.
Jo asks me when was the last time I was seen by a doctor from the EU. I haven’t. He reminds me the overwhelming majority of NHS staff are British, Asian or African.
He tells me of overwhelmed doctors’ offices closing their lists to new patients due to high demand.
A Pulse survey from December 2017 shows one third of GP practices are considering closing their patient-lists to manage demand. 175 practices received permission to close lists in 2014/15, 145 in 2015/16.
A week ago, I had shoulder surgery. With ten days’ notice, I was still unable to get an appointment with a nurse to take my stitches out. My 12-year-old did it instead. This is the story for so many of us, unable to get an appointment to see a GP.
This is the rub. British people are being forced out of their health service – which they fund and have funded all their lives – by recently arrived immigrants – many of whom have contributed nothing but are prepared to force themselves to the front of the queue and demand priority treatment.
Doctors’ time is wasted by those who shamelessly game the system to maximize their welfare and increase the probability of being allowed to stay in the country – immigrants who have never contributed to the service they now drain dry.