UK 'dopers...tell me your thoughts about the NHS

[Banquet_Bear]

@Magiver

did you even read through the cite? It conveniently left the US out.

…this thread isn’t supposed to be about the US at all.

I grabbed 2 major diagnostic tools for comparison:

MRI’S per million
UK - 6.1
US - 36.7

CT Scanners per million
UK - 8
US - 41.9

As I put it in another thread in a discussion with Bricker:

@Banquet_Bear

…these are not “good metrics.” What are you measuring?

Lets put two hospitals side-by-side. Everything is identical, but the hospital on the left has 3 MRI scanners and the hospital on the right has 4 MRI scanners.

Does the hospital on the right have objectively better metrics than the hospital on the left?

Lets bring the analogy closer to your Canada example. The hospital on the right now has 6 MRI scanners. Twice as many as the hospital on the left. How much more objectively better is the hospital on the right now?

Lets bring it to the UK. The hospital on the left has 3 MRI scanners. The hospital on the right now has 10. Is the hospital on the right objectively better?

Now what if I were to tell you that from a medical standpoint, the optimal amount of MRI scanners per hospital to deliver satisfactory outcomes was 1 MRI scanner. Which hospital is doing it better, the one on the left, the one on the right, or the one right behind me that only has one MRI scanner?

America has nearly 3 times the MRI scanners than we have in New Zealand. The first morning I was in hospital (mentioned earlier in the thread) I was scheduled for an MRI. I got wheeled into the MRI waiting room that afternoon. I had maybe a ten minute wait before they wheeled me in. Was my experience objectively worse than what I would have experienced if I were in America?

Without further context your metric is meaningless. I would argue the hospital on the right with 10 MRI scanners is worse off: because it has invested millions of dollars in pointless MRI scanners when that money could have been better deployed somewhere else.

The NHS CT median time is a little over 1 day but the MRI median delay is 20 days.

And?