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A pall of smoke hangs heavily over the middle east.
The world sits on the edge of its seat … what’s next? It’s not the best of times.
Is there any cheer? Can we allow ourselves a moment or two of hope?
Why not?
Did you know… the NHS is one of the country’s biggest buyers of potatoes, bandages and bog-rolls.
Not a lot of people know that.
Before you've finished reading this the NHS has probably spent twenty million quid and...
... every minute serves 260 meals, answers dozens of calls and starts another operation.
It’s not a service. It’s a small economy with a stethoscope.
In hospitals alone, the NHS serves around 140 million patient meals every year. That’ll be more meals than the largest fast-food chains combined.
Added to which it’ll get through over 60 million cups of tea and coffee every year.
Spuds? Yes… tens of thousands of tonnes each year, comparable to any major national catering chain.
If that doesn’t impress you...
... how about laundry services? They process about 200 million items of linen every year. I make that enough sheets to circle the Earth several times.
You name it, what ever it is, the NHS buys or uses the most;
- 600 million pairs of disposable gloves every year.
- 50 million rolls of toilet paper annually…
… that’s enough to stretch from London to Sydney and back.
I have no idea how many million sutures we use. My guesstimate; tens of millions.
Easily more than the whole of the UK veterinary sector, combined. Add to that, over 1 billion clinical dressings and consumables.
Around 5 billion individual medicines are dispensed in primary care annually.
Everything the NHS does, is on an industrial scale. Like...
... ~11 million operations a year, in England. More than 1.5 million cataracts... and about 600,000 babies born in NHS services, that’s about one a minute.
Ambulances travel hundreds of millions of miles annually… equivalent to going to the Moon and back and back and back…
We know a lot of people work in the NHS. Just how many? Tricky to say because of agency and things like that, but...
... we do know; NHS staff generate around 1.5 million payslips every month and the pension scheme is one of the largest in Europe, and …
… NHS people work in more buildings than most UK property companies own… over 1,200 hospital and community sites.
The NHS is criticised for being analogue but that ignores the fact NHS systems handle billions of digital transactions each year… from prescriptions to test results.
E-mails? There’s 1.47bn a year whizzing around the NHS and the bobble hats fend-off over 3 million malicious or dodgy emails every year, that’s roughly one attack every 10 seconds.
GPs, apart from looking after a million patients a day, they issue over 1 billion prescriptions a year, and …
… by the way… NHS call handlers answer around 2 million 111 calls each month and there are 1,000, 999 call every hour.
Every 24 hours the NHS spends roughly half a billion quid.
What ever it is, what ever it does, as you-know-who would say; it’s the biggliest .
The Friends and Family Test; in a typical year receives over 12 million responses.
Approximately 93% of these report a good or very good experience, amounting to roughly 11 million positive ratings annually.
Individual hospital trusts track unsolicited expressions of gratitude.
A single medium-sized trust can record over 3,300 formal compliments a year. Bigger places; 12,000 thank-you letters a year.
Feel better for that? Is the NHS ‘broken’? Complacent?
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Acute trusts; 2.7% increase in productivity for 24/25, more than triple the historical average of 0.6%.
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Agency spend slashed by 33% in the first half of 24/25.
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On track for £9 billion in efficiencies for 24/25, up 25% over last year.
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Martha’s Rule in 143 acute hospital sites.
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Learn from Patient Safety Events fully implemented across all trusts
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The NHS App reached 34m.
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Virtual Wards, for ~12,000 patients… equivalent to the capacity of 20 hospitals.
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AI scribing tested across multiple sites.
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Cancer Diagnosis, exceeded target to diagnose or rule out cancer for 75% of patients within 28 days.
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170 Community Diagnostic Centres
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370.7 million GP appointments in a single year
So, it’s ok to be proud of what you do…
… have a nice day.
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