On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.
Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
That's really not my experience. In fact, almost everyone is surprised when I suggest that despite its many problems, the NHS does better for the people than most modern countries' health systems.
No one I know who has lived in France or Germany or any developed country other than the US thinks the NHS is better than the systems in those countries.
There are times I opt for private services for speed, because I can afford to, but I could also afford private health insurance (which is cheap in the UK), and haven't felt the need to.
That said, dental is a weak spot of the NHS, with too few dentists offering NHS services, and there's a perceived quality difference in that the NHS treatments have fee caps that mean they will often not include the best aesthetic options. For dental I do tend to go private (but dental for adults is also excluded in quite a few other "universal" healthcare systems - like Norway; don't know about Spain)
> There are times I opt for private services for speed
I'm guessing the NHS, being public, comes with long waiting lists. So it's more about speed than quality of service? I'd assume most doctors with 20–30 years of experience are working in the private sector, right?
New Years Eve, my son was referred to an out-of-hours GP service within an hour of a phone consultation.
But while the shortest wait I've had for a video consultation for myself (via the NHS) was literally 10 minutes, the longest was two weeks.
If you have an emergency, you will be triaged and given a faster appointment if you use the right channels (111 - the non-emergency alterantive to 999/911, or urgent care walkin centres, or A&E as the last resort), but of course many things that are not an emergency will seem intolerable to wait for, and then it absolutely sucks if you can't afford to pay your way to be seen faster.
This is a political/cost issue - the NHS is bargain basement in terms of amount spent per patient compared to many other countries.
A large proportion of doctors in the private sector also works for the NHS, so quality of clinical experience has never been a concern to me.
E.g. when my ex looked for a doctor when she considered having a c-section done private, the top expert she could find was an NHS consultant that worked privately on the side. This is the widespread, and often the private clinics are operated by NHS trusts, as a means to supplement their budgets, and/or the operating rooms etc. are rented from NHS trusts.
If anything, my only negative experiene with lack of experience here has been with private providers (the only nurse that has ever struggled to draw blood from me in my entire life failed to get any blood from me after 3 agonisingly slow attempts where she rooted around in my arm for a vein. Every NHS nurse that has drawn blood from me or my son have been so fast at drawing blood you hardly notice before they're done even when they're filling multiple containers)
But if you want to be pampered, then private providers will be nicer. They're also nicer if you e.g. want more time - GP's are expected to allocate an average of something like 7 minutes per appointment for the NHS patients, for example, and how flexible they will be varies, while with a private GP you can pay for however long appointments you want.