I have tried not responding to this but after working all my working life in the NHS retiring as a prof and senior bod in the service, after nearly 40 years it is hard not to.
I have heard all that time how bad we are, what a lousy job we do, how it should all be privatised, etc etc. Patients in the latter years of my practice would come in and say how surprised they were that the staff were so pleasant how they saw me quickly and were pleasantly surprised at the speed and standard of care. They had taken in all the negative press. The fact that we have a staffing problem is understandable given this constant undermining. If you say what you do there is always someone who will stop you in the pub to tell you their bad experiences of the NHS, never their good, and by implication blame you. I am free of most of that now.
Let us consider the public responsibility to the NHS. The real threat to the NHS for all of us is the health behaviours of the UK population leading to obesity, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, increased cancer, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and more all of these are avoidable if people took responsibility for their own health but there it little evidence that the UK population is willing to do this- they keep getting fatter and more sedentary. But even there the NHS gets the blame for the public failing to take responsibility for themselves. Chronic conditions (my area) are, by their nature not curable, they are persistent and require a combined approach to care for the patient and the clinician to maximise benefits. I don't think clinicians are very good at managing this because they have been taught to see lack of a cure a failure and are not geared towards helping people cope, and many of the general public want nothing short of a cure without the responsibility of doing things for themselves.
The NHS is not perfect we all know that, there will always be examples of bad behaviour in a huge organisation and the NHS is the biggest organisation in Europe. If many people in industry do not do their job to 100% the consequences are negligible in healthcare they can be fatal. We spend less on health care than comparable nations, have fewer staff, especially specialist staff as the report published today highlights. We have a recruitment problem exacerbated by underinvestment in training and a cap on allowing overseas workers.
The NHS is by international standards and comparisons the most efficient health service for health outcomes. Efficient means the best outcomes to the amount of funding and there is the rub. If we spend the average others spend, invest better in the staff, we might start doing better.
Sorry for the rant.