A tale of 2 sickbeds: Health care in U.K. vs. U.S.

U.K. the way to go?
Most agree there’s a problem with health care in the U.S., but is the United Kingdom’s system the way to go? Certainly, the U.K.’s health care system has been held up as an example of how to go about things.

Polemical documentary maker Michael Moore took on the issue in his 2007 movie “Sicko” and gave the NHS, established in 1948, a glowing review. He interviewed a number of people to show that the NHS is in good shape, with everyone from brand-new parents to family doctors giving it rave reviews.

My take was more mixed than Moore’s. The good part was that my local doctor is part of a cooperative that allows patients to see someone after-hours instead of resorting to the emergency room. The doctor who saw me first seemed to take a real interest and helped admit me to the hospital within minutes. The obviously over-worked nurses treated me gently, calling me and everyone else on the wards “dearie” and “love.” When they saw me, the doctors focused on me intently and made sure I underwent a series of tests to make sure nothing was overlooked.

But as I was being rotated through different hospital wards, it didn’t always feel like I was benefiting from a gold standard of care. I had to be alert to any opportunity to talk to a doctor and nurse about my condition — it wasn’t that I felt the staff didn’t care, only that they had so much to do and so many people to look after.

So, I looked out for myself. I made a point of showering, washing my hands often and getting a clean gown every day — nobody else seemed to be paying very close attention to my hygiene or anybody else’s. I thanked God every day for lovely friends who visited and made sure I ate properly.

The wards were always noisy, making it impossible to get a good night’s sleep. Visitors wandered in and out throughout the day and late into the night. On my second night, I woke up to find that the woman across from me had fallen out of bed. She lay on the ground moaning while I dragged my IV down the hallway to look for the nurses.

The NHS is relentlessly picked apart in the media here, and the government is under enormous pressure to fix its problems, such as high cancer death rates, deadly infections flourishing in some hospitals and alleged understaffing and incompetence.

Medical care is extremely variable across the service, says Vanessa Bourne of the Patients Association, an advocacy organization, with the care and treatment highly dependent not only on what part of the country the patient lives in but also on the quality of individual family doctors, or general practitioners, as they are known here.

These highly independent professionals wield enormous power because they’re responsible for referring patients to specialists and tests. If yours is good — and mine is great, for the record — then your health is in safe hands. But if she or he is lazy or incompetent it can have a serious impact on your health. And there is very little recourse if you have a complaint because you’re pretty much stuck with whatever GP practice is in your neighborhood.

One friend here refuses to visit his GP’s office because they don’t listen to him and assume he is only there to get a pink slip off of work. He has tried raising a number of issues to deaf ears. This cannot be good for his health in the long run.

The NHS is often criticized for being unresponsive to the regular user and instead largely answerable to its own enormous organization.

And we are talking humongous: The NHS is the largest employer in Europe, with about 1.3 million people on its payroll. It has an annual budget of around 90 billion pounds, or roughly $160 billion dollars.

Another criticism is the practice in some parts of the country of stopping care if a patient pays out of their own pocket to get a treatment that is not on the NHS. In other words, if you have cancer and can afford an experimental drug that has not been approved for general use, the NHS will force you into totally private care.

The system’s problems, real and perceived, are such that the best jobs in this country offer private insurance. A few of my friends have paid thousands of dollars extra to get private care when they gave birth. For this private care you get your own room instead of sharing a ward with other new mothers and their babies, and extra care from doctors and the nurses.

This frightens me. Certainly, I’m nervous about depending on the over-stretched and arbitrary organization if I have a baby or when I get old. I can still hear one old woman next to me in the hospital crying “Mummy, Mummy,” when she realized no one would come to comfort her. Still, even if the system here is riddled with problems, I’ve come to appreciate the U.K.’s efforts to care for the health of all of its people, including me.

When I got sick I wasn’t afraid to call the doctor because of money. I was run through myriad tests and attended to by a fleet of nurses and doctors. I am now fully better. I can and do make appointments at my neighborhood doctor’s office a five-minute walk from my house, without ever having to worry about being bankrupted.

Brinley Bruton first came to Great Britain to live and work as a journalist in 2002. She had previously lived in New York City. Earlier this year, she became a dual citizen.

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