The reason your pops could get the private operation the next day is because most people, 99% go NHS. If everyone was private he'd be in a queue, there's only so many doctors to go round.
We're certainly under resourced but the amount of time doctors, surgeons and nurses spend tied up in red tape trying to deny people needed treatments is bordering on criminal especially for an organisation that this year are taking just shy of £5k from my tax bill. There 's a plethora of ways the NHS defer and deny patients treatment so that often going private is the only way to get care that you need whilst the NHS would have intentionally wasted even more staff time and patient time through their obfuscation for little if any real budget saving.
My old man is nudging 80 but is still incredibly fit, until recently walking 100 miles+ per week. He turned a knee and popped his cartlidge a month ago on a dodgy paving stone that has been reported and on the council's urgent repair radar for over 2 years and is now really struggling to move but has been told that whilst a younger man would get surgical treatment they would only consider it after 6 months of attempts to rectify it by physio at his age. He was already struggling to cope with my mother's worsening alzheimers and this has hit him physically to the point where he looks a good 20 years older than he did at Christmas, the physio has told him he will end up on sticks for life if he carries on and that in 6 months surgery will be a waste of time as his muscles will be too fecked.
I think I've finally got through to him and persuaded him to pay to have surgery privately, the biggest argument against being that he was scared to dip into his savings because he's not sure the government will fund my mother's residential care if he goes in for surgery and secretly fears that once she goes in she will not come back out which he now accepts would be better for them both.