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

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-dopers-tell-me-your-thoughts-about-the-nhs/808260>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [February 5, 2018, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-dopers-tell-me-your-thoughts-about-the-nhs/808260 "2018-02-05T20:53:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 137

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**Author:** ![Banquet\_Bear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banquet_bear/32/373_2.png) [@Banquet\_Bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banquet_Bear)\
**Post date:** [February 13, 2018, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-dopers-tell-me-your-thoughts-about-the-nhs/808260/137 "2018-02-13T03:23:22Z")

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> [@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](https://www.statista.com/statistics/282401/density-of-magnetic-resonance-imaging-units-by-country/)
> 
> CT Scanners per million  
> UK - 8  
> US - [41.9](https://www.statista.com/statistics/266539/distribution-of-equipment-for-computer-tomography/)

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

> [@House passes "repeal and replace"](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/house-passes-repeal-and-replace/785871/655):
>
> …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?

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