Unpopular opinion - NHS is useless

This would be an idea, Maybe go the other way and make the NHS solely public again.
Then we don’t have companies running the NHS who only care about profit.

As a long term NHS worker for over half my life I’ve gone private too.
Luckily my wife works for a big billion dollar pharma and with salary sacrifice gets private healthcare for the family for £35 a month (They contribute £55 and the rest is not paying tax and NI)

When has the NHS ever just dome checkups? This is an Americanism that's crept in and is above and beyond what the NHS is funded for.

It makes complete sense to do it, but if it's not funded and it's not contracted with GPs then who's paying for it?

They have done a few times for me, last time around 10 years ago (in a small, rural surgery too!) and a lot more when I was younger. Even if it's just check pressures, ask them questions about specific things. There will be hereditary problems I'll be going into soon based what others in my family have. Preventative maintenance would solve and catch a lot of it. Now they decide to push it on to pharmacists and put it under minor ailments. Had this nonsense when my hayfever was at it's worst.

It does when you can't breath, you feel like you're drowning every day, can't sleep and all the cheap stuff doesn't work. When I told the pharmacist how much of the usual stuff I was overdosing by to even function he told me it wasn't normal. It took me to find Bilastine via a recommendation and it was a fight to get that out of them.

Some private clinics do the injection still.

Someone must be paying for all this:

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/nhs-health-check/

Its not farcical, you sound like you don't need any medical attention at present so why would you go to the NHS? You want to chat about your concerns and run some basic checks, yeah book a private consultation with an appropriate doctor.

I think you are a sensible person who is concerned with their health and wants to keep on top of things. FWIW

My brother is a manager in the NHS. Honestly him and the team he works with couldn't work harder, they are all switched on people who have pretty balanced views.

I often discuss the NHS as a whole with him as I say he is a switched on bloke, he has said a more business mindset has crept into the management however it will not work as they are working within an organization that offers innumerable services to an every increasing population.

People look to private healthcare in the states, what people fail to mention is that sometimes people are traveling hours and 100's of miles to access certain specialists. He makes loads of other really good points if I am honest he has changed my opinion on a fair few points.

As for private healthcare here, well its heavily reliant on the NHS, both in terms of infrastructure and staffing and unfortunately we have all grown up thinking we have paid for our healthcare through taxation, when at present the reality is that funding the NHS alone would mean each UK resident pay £2500 a year just for healthcare. A case in point my grandmother just paid for a hip replacement £12k+, operated on in an NHS hospital, stayed in an NHS ward, moved via NHS ambulance. I am aware the private sector would have paid a sum for this however my point is the private health sector here is heavily reliant on the NHS.

I think the sooner we introduce some form of payment to access services the better!