You csnt really diagnose mental health problems at birth.
But what happens when the charities cant aford it? (MH is really not a good seller in the charity world)
You saod yourself these people are a danger.
So what do they just get thrown onto the streets, untill they hurt aomone then prison for the rest of thier life in soletary confine ment?
We aren't talking about cancer drugs we're talking about providing care rhat doesnr just help them it protects you
But we are talking about cancer drugs, and hundreds of other things, as soon as we start talking about whether to fund extra facilities, whatever the topic is. After all, the kid in question here is in an apparently suitable facility, is getting treatment, and the public is protected. Already.
The benefits of having him much closer to home aren't about those aspects of his treatment. They're about two things only. Firstly, whether more frequent visits by family would have a beneficial effect on his condition. My expectation is that yes, it would, but I'd bet the extent of that difference would be very hard to quantify. The other benefit is to the rest of his family in terms of travel cost, time and effort, and inconvenience, and any effect on their lives and while those are factors, they aren't the primary concern of the health service, especially when it comes to getting maximum value from limited funding. If you divert millions to build extra facilities solely on the basis of their geographical location, the cost is that those millions aren't available for primary care elsewhere, like an extra hospital ward, or kidney dialysis funding or, yes, expensive cancer drugs.
Do we really want a situation where some patients don't get primary medical care because we spent the money making life easier for another patient's family by cutting travel time?
The simple fact of it is that there are no good choices in what to not fund. This situation is horrible for this kid, so far from family, and for his family, so far from him. Everybody feels for him. But it's not as simple as rubbing a magic lamp and a genue builds an extra facility. It has to come from funding that otherwise funds something else, and someone has to, and apparently has, decided that there are uses for that funding that provide better 'value' for NHS funds.
Personally, there are a few things I'd look long and hard at whether the NHS should fund. For example, cosmetic surgery without an very good physical clinical need. Accident victims, yes, someone dissatisfied with their boob size, no. IVF is another contentious area, and apparently one where where you live at least partly determines how many rounds you get. That is, better provision in some areas than others .... just like secure children's mental health facilities. Yet another, arguably, might be liver transplants for chronic alcoholics, or lung cancer surgery for long term smokers.
But any and all of these are going to be contentious, and provoke some hard ethical issues, if you try to cut them. And every single one of them is going to have people calling for them to be funded.
At the moment, there have been several extremely interesting developments in cancer treatment. It's beginning to look like the 'cure' for cancer might actually be a series of different cures for different cancers, or even a cure specific to a given patient based on manipulating their own cells for a cancer-specific 'antidote'. Or, like a recent trial suggests, a cure for breast cancer might even come, in 11 days, from using two existing treatments in a way not previously done.
If any of those avenues prove fruitful, and indications are promising, the result could well be millions of lives saved over time, and vast reductions in the cost of cancer treatments for the NHS, leaving that previously allocated funding available for other things, be it dialysis machines or, yes, kids mental health facilities in the SW.
In an ideal world, petitions like this would be unnecessary because ideal treatment provision, for everything, would already exist. But we don't have an ideal world, and whatever one person's "need" is will be their highest priority but others, with different problems, will see other things as a higher priority for funding, either at a local level in the SW, or at national level such as NIHCE funding decisions.
