In Sickness and in Health?

I've got a torn tendon in my right hand & I've had to do a lot of chasing to get anything done about it. It seems that hand clinics & much else have all been outsourced to a private company called CORA. After waiting nearly 3 weeks for an appointment & trying to navigate a dreadful website, I finally phoned them. The woman I spoke to was really helpful & emailed me a "choose & book" form. The Oxford clinic had no appointments at all, Bicester & Banbury had 6 month waits. So I've had to choose Reading which has a 3 month wait. That's despite the GP saying the referral was urgent. I'm right handed, so the impact of the damage is difficult to deal with.

It brought home how the NHS is struggling. This isn't life threatening. Fortunately it isn't excruciatingly painful any more, but I can't put any pressure on with the palm of my hand & the hand is permanently at an angle & very stiff. So washing & dressing, making the bed & washing up for example, are really difficult. When I swim I have to have it splinted & dread someone knocking my hand. My osteopath thinks it might need surgery.

The median wait time for planned hospital treatment in England is 13.3 weeks, according to the latest NHS data from June 2025. I'm assuming that means the first consultation, not actual treatment. The pre-pandemic average was 7.3 weeks in 2019. Apparently trauma & orthopaedics has the highest number of patients on the waiting list, with over 800,000 people waiting in March 2024. So I'm not alone.

I'm doing what I can, I can afford my osteopath who is very good. Swimming helps because I do back crawl which means the water resists the hand & pushes it back a bit. I've bought a gel fidgit ball which feels like squeezing a silicone boob! But my concern is what sort of movement will I be left with after such a long wait to be seen, never mind actual treatment. I need an ultrasound scan to see exactly what the damage is.

But everything needs to be put into context - people are not being diagnosed in a timely way, they are  suffering a lot of pain & disability, some must be dying needlessly, because our health service isn't as good as it should be.

If we want the care we deserve the NHS has to improve the way it operates, (excuse the pun). But we too need to make clear that we want to fund it properly. The UK generally spends less per person on healthcare compared to other high-income European nations, such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. This is because other countries are wealthier than the UK, some make better political choices about health care & some make more efficient use of resources. 

There is room for improvement in the NHS, but it needs political will, taxpayers to pay more & the NHS to put it's organisation in order.

 

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/comparing-nhs-to-health-care-systems-other-countries