"Benchmarking NHS hospitals against Scandinavian hospitals"

My wife had a small 1/2 day operation in Kettering - which ended up being two days in hospital due to complications after anaesthetic.

My observations (benchmarking against Scandinavia), applies also to Nottingham and Huntingdon hospitals that my family has used in last 5 years.

1) In general

- everything is free (not in Scandinavia)

- people are friendly

- but it looks and feels that you are back in 60s

2) Hygienic ( related to 'hospital super bacteria' - that also increases NSN costs)

- overall cleanness and e. g. toilets are nowadays clearly improved (compared 10 years ago); level of good quality pub but not level of a good restaurant

- doctors are working, coming and leaving hospital in their personal clothes => so bacterias are also coming and going freely with them in their clothes

- nurses do the same with their uniforms

This is not a budget thing but a mind set. A lot to improve compared to Scandinavia.

3) Process efficiency

- during the first day my wife needed to give the same personal details, her medication details, health and allergy etc. details for 8 times for 8 different people ( nurses and doctors).

- all this will take a lot of time from them to first write on paper and the. To their computing system

- this time is out of the time doctors and nurses could spend with their customers (patients); maybe even some of that could be saved by reduced personnel

- in any case there must a computer system plan in place to enable everybody (relevant for care process per patient); just copy proudly from some more advanced EU country and don't develop your own; you will be just cheated again

- meanwhile hire minimum salary people to ask and fill the data to NHS systems and release nurses and doctors to do what they are trained for and good at

Summary

UK people complain too much NHS. Maybe big differencies based on postcode where you are living ... but in general in my Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire experience I would say UK NHS is one of the best in the world.

Surely the cheapest for patients.

But even that can improved as identified above.

I would benchmark with few EU countries the NHS number of admin and management people and their salaries on average per patient - and I would bet that the biggest cost savings are there.