Tag Archives: wait

Tory underfunding means 1.2 MILLION people are waiting for vital NHS treatment

Waiting for treatment: thanks to Tory policies, 1.2 million people are being made to wait for vital treatments and operations.

This is the flipside of the Tory plan to give £2 billion to private health firms for non-essential health procedures.

They give £200 million to the privateers’ bank accounts and it isn’t available for brain surgery, cataract treatment and gynaecology – among other vital work.

And the waiting list grows.

This was a conscious choice, made by Tory leaders years before anybody dreamed of a crisis like Covid-19.

They wanted to starve the NHS of cash and resources in order to nudge patients and the general public into the false belief that a socialised medical service can’t possibly work.

(In fact, a system in which everybody pays into a national health scheme is the only way everybody can benefit from affordable health care. Privatised or insurance-based schemes are always either too expensive for most people to afford, meaning they have to live with – and sometimes die with – preventable health problems, or they are rip-offs designed to take cash from gullible punters.)

They didn’t – and don’t – care that people are suffering, and may die, because of their privatisation push, that is not based on fact but on fanatical right-wing ideology.

The long and the short of it is that, if you are waiting months and years for vital treatments and operations, to the point where it is causing you pain and/or even endangering your life, there is a reason.

It is because Conservatives like health secretary Sajid Javid, former health secretary Matt Hancock, and prime minister Boris Johnson – along with all the other Tory government ministers going back to 2010 – wanted you to suffer; wanted your life to be in danger.

If you know anybody who voted Tory, they voted for you to suffer in this way.

And for those of you who actually voted Conservative yourself: what were you thinking? That’s actual self-harm.

Source: Almost 1.2m people waiting at least six months for vital NHS services in England | NHS | The Guardian

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Wait for dentist appointments in England stretches from two to three years in three months

Check-up: if you haven’t made an appointment already, don’t expect to be in this position at any time… probably for the rest of your natural life.

Dental treatment in England is collapsing beneath the weight of demand.

Only three months ago, This Site reported that NHS patients were being told to wait two years for appointments. Now we learn that the wait has been extended to three.

By the time these poor souls get any treatment, they’ll probably have lost every tooth they have in their mouths!

The report by Healthwatch England confirmed that people are being advised to take private care instead – at cost.

Back in February, the same organisation reported that people were being asked to pay £1,700 to private practitioners for treatments that would cost £60 on the NHS.

Other findings in the latest report include:

  • People removed from the practice list for not making an appointment sooner.
  • Repeated cancelled appointments – even midway through treatment.
  • Dentists have reported that they have thousands of people on their waiting lists, with some patients claiming they are unable to even get on a waiting list.
  • Dentists shutting down or going completely private.
  • Patients being asked to wait up to three years for appointments – or six weeks for emergency care.
  • Some who called NHS 111 seeking emergency dental care were told to “use salt water” and carry on calling practices until they could find help.
  • Other patients have been told to use DIY filling kits while they wait for an appointment.
  • People being increasingly prescribed antibiotics with no prospect of a follow-up appointment to actually treat the problem.

It’s a racket, isn’t it? Blackmail.

Dentists have realised that the Covid-19 lockdowns have created huge queues for treatment that they know the surgeries they run for the NHS cannot service.

They are greedily worsening this bottleneck by closing NHS practices, forcing people either to pay a fortune for private care or face a future of pain and possible disfigurement as their teeth decay.

Perhaps it will serve them right when they find that the victims of their scam can’t afford to pay them; and consider even NHS prices to be too expensive:

The watchdog warned that even when people can get access to dental care on the health service, three fifths (61%) of people deem treatment too expensive.

Healthwatch England has called for sweeping reforms to NHS dentistry to avoid harm to the dental health of the UK as a nation.

Fat chance.

The Department of Health has said it is committed to ensuring everybody can access affordable, high-quality dental care.

But it has said nothing about how it will achieve this miracle in the face of dental practitioners’ unwillingness to co-operate. Its spokespeople have been able to talk about only what they did in 2019-20.

You can bet Boris Johnson’s corrupt crew won’t do anything at all for the rest of us. They can afford dentistry, after all.

Anybody who voted for the Conservatives voted for their own teeth to rot out of their head.

Source: People in England ‘face three-year waits for dentist appointments’ | Dentists | The Guardian

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Scandal of NHS dental patients told to ‘pay private fees’ or wait in pain in Covid crisis

Say “Aah!” But the scream is more likely to be from financial pain, or the pain of waiting for an appointment that disappears ever-further into the future.

The Canary is absolutely right to draw attention to this scandal. Mrs Mike tried to make an emergency appointment last month and the earliest she could get was the end of March.

Still, it could be worse…

Some NHS dental patients … face two-year waits for appointments, a watchdog has warned.

I haven’t seen a dentist for more than two years, since the local NHS practice lost one of its practitioners. I was told my appointment would be delayed and a few months later I was quietly removed from the books.

The nearest practices that might have vacancies for NHS patients are 50 miles to the north or south.

Of course, we could go private. Have you seen how much that would cost?

Healthwatch England was contacted by one patient who was offered a procedure for £1,700 which was £60 on the NHS.

It seems that, even if we survive the Covid-19 pandemic, our teeth may not.

The advice people are being given echoes a satirical sketch from The Day Today, back in the 1990s, warning people against seeking treatment from backstreet dentists.

Compare that with this:

Another patient was told to use a nail file to deal with a broken tooth, and others were advised to “buy dental repair kits and treat themselves”.

This is the culmination of decades in which successive UK governments have neglected our dental health.

Profiteers have ensured that it is not worthwhile to run a dental practice on the NHS. It is far more lucrative to go private, and to hell with the teeth of people who can’t pay.

Oh, and of course it is not profitable to work in rural areas; the big bucks are in the cities so, while dentists might start out in small towns like mine in Mid Wales, they clear off to urban areas as soon as they can.

The Covid crisis has just brought these facts into sharp focus.

And what do you think will be done about it, once the virus has died down?

I’ll give you a clue: nothing.

As long as dentistry remains a gravy train, it will be denied to people outside the cities, who don’t have a ton of spare cash to throw around.

Or you could demand change now. You should – because even if you’re in a good position now, there’s no guarantee that you always will be.

Source: NHS dental patients told to ‘pay private fees’ if they want treatment | The Canary

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Universal Credit claimants have been forced to wait 11 weeks for benefits

Hundreds of thousands of universal credit claimants have been forced to wait for around 11 weeks to receive their benefits, it has been revealed:

The National Audit Office (NAO) finds that although the government has significantly improved the proportion of claims paid on time – from 55 per cent to 90 per cent in the last three years – “unclear” communication from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has caused people with complex needs and circumstances to “slip through the net”

In 2019, new claimants who were paid late faced average delays of three weeks in addition to the five-week wait for a first universal credit payment. Around 6 per cent of households – amounting to 105,000 new claims – waited around 11 weeks or more, according to the report.

There have been 2.5 million new household claims for universal credit since mid-March, with one in five adults in Britain having applied or planned to apply for benefits as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

The NAO carried out the research before the pandemic hit, but the watchdog said the issues raised were only going to become more important as the economic upheaval caused by the crisis continue.

And the Tories said they’ve been handling this so well!

For the record, 11 weeks is more than twice as long as claimants should expect to wait – and it is well-known that the five-week wait is considered to push people into poverty and debt.

How much worse have the Tories made it for all the claimants they’ve had since the Covid lockdown?

Source: Hundreds of thousands of universal credit claimants forced to wait 11 weeks for benefits, watchdog warns | The Independent

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Coronavirus: Tories endanger disabled people with homicidal choice between a rock and a hard place

What charmers these Tories are! They’re telling UK-based people with disabilities they have a choice between starving while waiting for their benefit claim to be honoured, and dying of Covid-19 because the Tory government is sending them back to work too soon:

Disabled people and their carers are being put at risk of catching coronavirus by returning to the workplace after being missed off the government’s vulnerable list, the Guardian has learned.

As Britain edges back to work, employers are understood to be denying some disabled people and carers paid leave to remain at home if they cannot provide a letter from the government showing proof of vulnerability, despite being at high risk from coronavirus or caring for someone who is.

The government’s register for extremely vulnerable people, which has previously been criticised for excluding a number of high-risk disabilities, is primarily designed to help signpost the need for food support. But it has emerged some employers are using the list as a condition for allowing employees to take paid leave.

Disabled people and carers who were not on the list told the Guardian they had been required to go into work by their employer or face dismissal when they could not show proof of vulnerability, with one worker forced to self-isolate between shifts in order to protect their disabled child.

This is just plain homicidal, from a government that has been caught victimising people with disabilities – to death – many times in the past.

It’s no excuse to say that nobody asked employers to use this flawed register; it was the government’s responsibility to get it right.

But – as with so much of the Tory response to Covid-19 – the effort made was lacklustre, slipshod, and discriminatory.

Intentionally?

Source: Disabled people in UK threatened with sack unless they go back to work | Society | The Guardian

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Disabled benefit claimants are sidelined* again as DWP assessors diverted to Universal Credit

Once again the Tory government shafts people with disabilities.

More than a quarter of a million people who should be receiving sickness and/or disability benefits are falling into debt because the DWP is forcing them to wait for a decision while it deals with coronavirus-related Universal Credit claims.

Yes – it is important to help the people claiming UC because the government’s lockdown deprived them of their income. We must not hold a grudge against them because they were dumped in a bad situation.

But the Tory government has a responsibility of care – in which it failed by diverting staff to handle UC and cutting PIP (Personal Independence Payment) and ESA (Employment and Support Allowance) claimants adrift.

Why not just divert staff who would have been working in job centres? Why not employ somebody new, on a temporary basis, if necessary?

These are rhetorical questions.

The answer is that no Conservative government will lift a finger to help people with illnesses and disabilities if it can find an excuse not to.

People who are physically or mentally infirm are unable to work for Tory-supporting employers and are therefore of no use to that party.

As Tories consider all working people to be nothing more than “stock”, we may conclude that they consider sick or disabled people to be defective stock, and therefore fit only to be scrapped.

This is the only rational explanation for the way Tories have treated people who deserve as much respect as anybody else.

The worst of it is that these overlooked claimants probably expect to receive attention as soon as the coronavirus crisis ends. This is doubtful; the Tories will find another excuse to make them wait.

Reason: making sick and disabled people wait is a great way of making them die, without any fear of blame.

Figures published by the DWP in response to a parliamentary written question show that as of 27 April there were 166,630 personal independence payment (PIP) claimants with either an assessment scheduled or awaiting scheduling. As of 4 May, 101,910 people were waiting on employment support allowance (ESA) claims.

Charities are also concerned that people who are trying to appeal decisions to reduce their sickness and disability benefits are facing longer than usual delays.

*Feel free to read in a more colourful verb of your choice.

Source: Coronavirus: Hundreds of thousands of benefit claimants facing delays as DWP staff diverted due to pandemic | The Independent

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DWP ‘didn’t consider’ scrapping five-week wait for Universal Credit – because the Tories didn’t want to?

We already knew the DWP hasn’t had any intention of scrapping the five-week wait between claiming Universal Credit and receiving the notice that you’re not receiving anything. But this is revealing:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has come under renewed pressure to scrap the minimum five-week wait for Universal Credit after a Tory welfare minister admitted the Government ‘didn’t really consider’ the measure.

The welfare delivery minister Will Quince MP was challenged over why the DWP hasn’t scrapped the five-week wait or turned advance payments into grants, which opposition MPs claim would help to protect families affected by the Coronavirus outbreak, during a Work and Pensions Select Committee meeting on Thursday.

Quince told MPs that due to administrative costs of introducing the changes “it wasn’t even really considered as an option” and that the structure of the Universal Credit system is unlikely to change during the crisis.

He said: “Even if we were able to secure the £2.2 billion a year that would be required to do that, it is not operationally deliverable.

Hang on!

Universal Credit was supposed to make the benefit system simpler to administer – and therefore cheaper.

This is an admission that “administrative costs” make even the simplest changes – ending a pointless wait for benefits that we were told was only imposed to make UC emulate payment of the salaries received by middle-class people who were unlikely to claim the benefit… until now.

Alternatively: isn’t it more likely that the Tories are squirming because the real reason they won’t scrap the five-week wait is simply that…

They don’t want to?

I’ve already explained that the five-week wait, for people who are already desperate for cash, means claimants are likely to have to request an advance loan (the Tories are refusing to change them into grants). Paying back these loans will plunge them further into debt in the long run.

The coronavirus – and the lockdown that the Tories have imposed – mean that many people have lost their source of income and are looking to the Tories to help them.

Instead – it’s worse than letting them down – the Tories are actively harming them.

Source: DWP ‘didn’t really consider’ scrapping the five-week wait for Universal Credit – Welfare Weekly

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Tories refuse to help Universal Credit claimants left dangling due to coronavirus

Thousands upon thousands of formerly-working people are learning the realities of the UK benefit system, after being told by the Tories to wait months before their first benefit payment.

If they hoped the Tories would speed up the four-week assessment period for Universal Credit – because of the coronavirus crisis and the cash crisis it has created for millions – they thought wrong.

And they need to remember that they won’t get paid until a week after the assessment period ends; it’s a five-week total wait.

The Tories could make the wait shorter – but they won’t.

The usual excuse is that UC is supposed to mimic the salary system in which people get paid once a month (except of course we know that many people are paid weekly, or fortnightly).

The current excuse, sported by UC director general Neil Couling is “If you play about with the architecture of Universal Credit you won’t be able to pay the vast millions we have to pay every month.”

Nonsense.

It’s an automatic system. If you qualify, you qualify – and it can pay you straight away.

It doesn’t, because the Tory system is to make you wait; to push you far enough to take out an advance loan that will take months to pay off; to push you into permanent debt.

It seems the coronavirus is a perfect opportunity to get 1.4 million people (at current count) servicing a needless debt for months to come.

Hopes new Universal Credit payments could be made faster have been dashed after the Government said the four-week assessment period was ‘integral’ to the benefits system.

Many campaign groups had been hoping for an accelerated process to help alleviate the pressure families found themselves under after the coronavirus outbreak forced businesses to close and people to stay at home as part of the lockdown.

Speaking at a press briefing, Universal Credit director general Neil Couling said: ‘If you play about with the architecture of Universal Credit you won’t be able to pay the vast millions we have to pay every month.’

Source: ‘No chance’ wait for Universal Credit payments can be shortened | Metro News

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Coronavirus crisis won’t persuade Tories to axe the five-week wait for Universal Credit

97,386th in the queue: one claimant’s Universal Credit agony caught in a screenshot.

The Conservatives have insisted on forcing financial instability on hundreds of thousands of people – by refusing to ditch the five-week wait for Universal Credit.

The Tory government has claimed it is helping people who have lost income because of the coronavirus crisis by saying they can claim UC while the UK is under lockdown.

But their refusal to waive the five-week rule means the half a million or more people who have claimed in the last 10 days will be severely out-of-pocket.

Indeed, according to the PoliticsHome article (see link below), 70,000 people have already applied for an advance on their payments.

This is a loan. Good luck to all of those people when they try to pay it off!

This Writer can’t understand Therese Coffey’s comments.

She said: “The design is meant to be based on your general income. We need a month to assess what your monthly income is likely to be.”

No they don’t! They know exactly how much claimants have earned in the past and exactly how much they are likely to earn while they are claiming – it’s all included in the claim information.

I don’t even accept the excuse offered by Peter Schofield, Permanent Secretary for the Department for Work and Pensions.

He said it was impossible to change the conditions under which UC is paid because the system is working at full capacity and changing it would require “reprogramming, resetting or manual processes which we simply, at those levels of volumes, wouldn’t be able to manage”.

It’s a computerised system. Any such change should only require the equivalent of flicking a switch – otherwise what was the point of making it a computer program in the first place?

The intention was to make it easily-adaptable – or at least that’s what we were told.

So… what are we to conclude?

That the Conservatives are perfectly capable of changing Universal Credit to make it payable at once – but they refuse? Now why on Earth would they want to do that if we’re really “all in it together”?

Source: Government insists it won’t ditch five-week wait for Universal Credit despite coronavirus outbreak

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DWP is swamped by half a million Universal Credit claims in coronavirus crisis

Another back-of-a-fag-packet Tory scheme falls apart.

Boris Johnson told us that Universal Credit would be available to self-employed people who become out-of-pocket as a result of his coronavirus lockdown. It’s a con, because they will receive just £94 per week, whereas employees whose firms sign up to the government’s wage guarantee will receive 80 per cent of their normal pay, up to £2,500 per month.

That’s a big difference – but the wage guarantee isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either; think what happens in firms that don’t sign up to it.

What a shame he didn’t find out whether the Department for Work and Pensions could cope with the extra load first.

And how strange that senior DWP official were reportedly sent to Job Centres, when the Job Centres are closed to appointments and assessments.

So what do you think has happened?

According to Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey, the department has processed almost half a million claims in nine days.

And what do you think that means for the average claimant?

Here’s one now:

“Been trying to apply for Universal Credit and get my £95pw,” he writes.

“I started 4 hours ago.

“The number of people ahead of me in the queue has fallen by roughly 1,000.

“At this rate it will take 16,230.8 days to get to the front of the queue.

“Isn’t it great being self-employed?”

This story suggests Ms Coffey has been overoptimistic about the speed with which her people are processing claims.

I find the deadpan of the DWP computer system unintentially comical: “Number of users in queue ahead of you: 97,385.

“Your estimated wait time is: more than an hour.”

And of course people contacting the DWP about their continuing claims have been caught up in the delays.

A commenter to This Site told me they needed to contact the DWP before March 21 to meet a Universal Credit deadline – but was unable to do so because of the delays.

So the DWP sent a message saying the benefit had been stopped.

Fortunately it was possible to reinstate the payments in this case.

But the message is clear:

This was another promise Boris Johnson simply couldn’t keep. He is a menace to the public.

Source: Almost 500,000 people in UK apply for universal credit in nine days | World news | The Guardian

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/

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