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I stand corrected if this is true that the UK's hospitals are all ultra-modern.

Hmmm. This is a a bit disengenuous. I don't think ukbird said all the hospitals here are now ultra-modern. He (she) said:

The UK is in the middle of the biggest hospital building programme in its history, with over 70 major hospital projects in progress or planned.

To me, this doesn't mean they tear down all the old hospitals, it says to me they are building or planning to build 70 new ones. This is a fairly ambitious project it seems to me, but even as small as the UK might seem to many Americans, 70 hospitals could fall into the UK and get lost and nobody in London would ever know what happened to them.

Here where I live in Scotland, we have a fairly new hospital. It was opened in 1988. I think you'd find a varying lot if you roamed across the UK- old hospitals and new.

One thing that happens with eyewitness reports... Let's say someone goes to the hospital and finds the floor dirty. Does this mean all the hospitals in the country are this way? No, of course not. I think papers like the Evening Standard and most of the citizens of London are very often guilty of forgetting that there is a whole big country out there beyond their city's borders and it isn't altogether comparable with London itself. Had the article's author toured Scotland's minor cities and towns he would have found hospitals that flew right in the face of the assertion he was making.

Take it for what it's worth. Here's a hospital in Pt Talbot, for example, that's being constructed right now. There is a programme here called PFI or Private Finance Iniative where the gov't is trying to move toward private sector funding of new hospitals. Here is an example of this (exerpts): Looking up the Hospital Front:

UNDER a UK Government initiative, new hospitals are being built and then operated for decades in partnership with private sector companies. AMEC is a leading player in the consortiums which are building and operating these new hospitals - recently completing Britain’s first and also winning the deal to build and run the latest and largest PFI hospital project in London . . .
...Built in the grounds of one of the old hospitals it replaces - which remained fully operational throughout construction - the £87 million, 444-bed hospital was financed, designed and constructed for Carlisle Hospitals NHS Trust in just 122 weeks by Health Management Carlisle (HMC), a consortium of AMEC and Building and Property Group...
...Meanwhile, a consortium that includes AMEC has won a £225 million deal to build and operate a magnificent new hospital in the heart of London. University College London Hospitals NHS Trust and private sector consortium Health Management UCLH plc, have finalised agreements for the design, financing, construction and operation of the huge project...
...When open, the state-of-the-art 669-bed facility will bring together all the NHS acute care facilities that are currently provided by The University College Hospital, The Middlesex Hospital, The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital and the Hospital for Tropical Diseases...

But the picture isn't quite as rosy as that. When you factor in trade unions you start to have complications.

Strike threat over private sector plan- source- BBC September 2001 (exerpts):

Union leaders are threatening strike action if the government's plans for public-private partnerships lead to worse conditions for workers...
The GMB released figures suggesting 24,000 hospital construction jobs could go as a result of lost investment due to PFI.
The union worked out that the £3bn it believes private companies will make out of PFI could have paid for 30 new hospitals, creating 75,000 posts for hospital staff besides the 24,000 jobs for construction workers.
It has emerged that three private finance hospital pilot schemes agreed in June have been put on hold.

So you see, new hospitals are being built but at the end of the day, a hospital is just a building. The UK is still facing shortages of doctors and key equipment. Concerns from Labor Unions, the huge cumbersome bureaucracy of the NHS, abuse of the "free" health system by citizens, doctor shortages, equipment shortages are all problems that make social medicine a substandard system. It's a much bigger, much more complicated problem...

This is by now a pretty ancient thread, but I've only just caught up with your post. You've asked me a direct question, and do, of course, deserve the courtesy of a reply - my apologies that it's so belated.

In pointing out the current hospital building programme (which is, btw, exhaustively documented on UK government Dept of Health websites), I didn't mean to imply that ALL UK hospitals were as a consequence modern - far from it. There's an enormous diversity of old and new, and will be for years to come. But the essential point on the capital programme is that the picture is fluid and dynamic, not static as others on the thread implied. This point was well made by a later post from Prodigal Son. Even before the current programme, new hospitals were being built. My own nearest general hospital, for instance, which is in Exeter, has been completely rebuilt twice since the 1960s.

On the broader question of standards in the NHS, I simply stated my happy personal experience, without seeking to generalise from that experience. I do, of course, know that the experience of others has been very different, just as I know others who have been as fortunate as I have. I did acknowledge that there are huge problems in the NHS (many of which are currently being addressed, with varying degreees of success).

I'm wary of making sweeping generalisations, based on personal observation which is necessarily limited, about a very large organisation: and I'm consequently also wary of such generalisations made by others, including some on this thread.

The NHS is so large (I believe that, depending on how you measure it, it's the world's third or fourth largest employer) that even within a single hospital, personal experience will vary greatly. For instance, UKCajun cited the East Surrey Hospital in his/her litany of disgrace. Well, as it happens, I do know that hospital reasonably well. I have been a frequent visitor there to my elderly mother-in-law, who was at different times treated for three separate but serious problems, one surgical, one medical, and one psychiatric. On each occasion the care and outcome were excellent. But I wouldn't dream of claiming from this that the East Surrey Hospital is an unblemished institution - quite clearly, from the experience of UKCajun and others, it isn't. A similar point was, again, well made by Prodigal Son.

If I am to be tempted to generalise, I make, diffidently, the following, not particularly original conjecture:

In any very large organisation (and no-one seriously denies that the NHS is far TOO large) there is likely to be a mixture of the good and the bad;

Political, media and public scrutiny will quite properly concentrate on excoriating the bad rather than discovering and lauding the good;

A public perception therefore becomes established, both at home and abroad, that the bad typifies the whole, rather than that it is part of a much more complex and variable reality.

(Apologies, by the way, to any who are irritated by my use of UK spelling conventions!)