Being Ill is Officially Expensive - The Hidden Costs of the NHS

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Being Ill is Officially Expensive - The Hidden Costs of the NHS

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uploaded by Arleen Ouzounian

The NHS was established to do exactly what it said on the tin,
provide health services to the nation. However, is this still true
today?

The following costs may mount up causing a large dent in a loved one's pocket:

• Parking fees up to £3.50/hr
• Parking penalties if time on ticket expires
• TV use at £2.90/day*
  
• Internet use
• Calls to land lines at 30p/min
• Calls to mobile phones at 60p/min

* Now scrapped, but still operating in some NHS hospitals.

It
was reported that Leeds Hospitals Trust netted more than £1.5million in
parking fees from patients and visitors, last year alone. Shockingly,
it was reported in March this year that hospitals around the country
collected £95million. Some have even called it a tax on sickness. The
idea of introducing parking fees was to combat parking spaces being
used for purposes other than visiting the hospital, which to be fair
should be targeted. However, is paying necessary? Surely there are
other ways to achieve this objective, such as introducing cards on
entry that are swiped in the hospital once you have made your visit.
Furthermore, do we even need to charge patients, we know they are using
parking spaces legitimately. The Department of Health has stated that
there are exemptions for patients, but are they being used?
[If I visit a loved one for a day, say 8 hours, I would need to pay up to £28. In a week I would need to pay £196]

Parking
penalties set out to achieve the same aim, discouraging people using
parking spaces for purposes other than visiting the hospital. However,
I do believe that a penalty in itself is very harsh as the majority of
people who suffer the consequences are visitors to the hospital. Why
should visitors be punished, surely they are not in the best situation
to start off with. Visiting the sick may be emotionally traumatising,
so to come back to your car, which has a fine slapped on the
windscreen, just takes the biscuit. Many visitors have been in
situations where they have had to stay by the patient's bedside (due to
the patient being in labour etc) and have been fined up to £50. How can
this be moral?

Staying in a hospital, staring at a dull ceiling
is not very entertaining... There are probably a million and one better
ways to spend one's time. How about playing a game on a mobile, or
having a text conversation? No, sorry, mobiles are banned from wards.
What about watching TV or surfing the net? Yes, at a cost. If in
hospital for a couple of days these costs may seem small. However, stay
in hospital for weeks, or even worse - months, and you can kiss goodbye
to the latest ipod you've been saving up for. Hospitals seem to me as
place of pain and suffering and the NHS are making it far worse by
imposing a cost on entertainment available.

Finally, calls to
land lines and mobiles seem astonishingly high. Most hospitals do not
permit the use of mobile phones within the premises, as they apparently
interfere with life saving equipment. However, every doctor in the
hospital is permitted to use his or her pager. Pagers use the same
technology as mobile phones, so would interfere just as much. The ban
on mobiles forces patients to
use the hospital phone, creating more profits for the hospital.
However, it is totally understandable that the last thing anyone
wishes, when they are seriously ill or dying, is to hear a cheesy
ringtone such as the crazy frog blaring from their neighbour's phone
umpteen times a day. The solution should be enforcing rules allowing
mobile use only on silent or vibrate.
[If a loved one phones a mobile for 10 mins and a land line for 20 mins each day, that costs £12. Over a week the total is £84.]

One
truely cannot afford to be ill. Hence, this poses a problem for low
income earners and the unemployed. Therefore, NHS doesn't do quite what
it says on the tin.

One also wonders, if the NHS nets so much money from all these hidden expenses, where does it all go?

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