[civilitty]

In the UK it’s much worse than normal for rural areas due to chronic underfunding of social services and healthcare.

There’s too many factors to go into but the most pressing issue is that there aren’t enough care home beds available to discharge elderly patients so there’s not enough beds available in hospitals. Ambulances often have to wait long times before they can unload a patient at the hospital which ties them up - at one point ambulances had to wait over an hour on one out of ten trips nationally (thats just the stat the NHS keeps, they often wait for much longer than an hour).

Combined with population growth significantly outpacing growth in NHS budget and staffing, it’s created a perfect storm of shite.

[themitigating]

You mentioned the population growth but what about aging population? Because of that wouldn't funding need to be exponentially increased each year. At the same time a smaller working population and who are against tax increases would make that difficult.

[nvm0n1]

Integrated healthcare systems in other countries like Kaiser can balance patient flows between hospitals and care homes. This is something that in theory the UK should be good at given it's also an integrated system, but the dysfunction caused by trying to have the government centrally plan everything means it doesn't work in practice. The issue isn't under-funding, the UK social/healthcare system has plenty of money relative to peers.

Beyond general disorganization the UK system shoots itself in the foot regularly. Care homes are bottlenecked by labor cost, so their solution was:

1. Raise the minimum wage, thus increasing care prices and ensuring more people can't afford to pay for it even though there's lots of available labor.

2. Fire huge numbers of carers because they didn't want to get vaccinated, even though the vaccines weren't reducing transmission and their elderly tenants were multiple-vaccinated anyway.

(2) was especially damaging because care homes were one of the few sectors that had vaccine mandates in the UK, so people have now learned that if they go to work at care homes then they will be forced to take experimental medical things even if they don't want to or if it doesn't seem to make sense. That's a big downside to a job that already had few upsides.