97 Yr old Gran waiting 8 hours for an ambulance with a broken hip!

My mum will be getting discharged from hospital soon, and she needs a care package before she comes home.
I’m hoping if it’s not in place in time she will get respite until it is.

How’s your granny now, OP?

People do have private health care already if they want it.
That shouldn’t be forced on some though and not on others.
Unless their payments go only into the private system which defeats the purpose really as the nhs will then have lost their payments.

@Manypaws sorry i wasnt suggesting the responder should have dealt with the stroke, as this is the person who comes out and calls an ambulance if that is needed. My point is that if it takes this person 40 minutes to arrive then anything that requires super urgent care is already too late and the person will die. And surely most people can put a blanket on top of someone lying on a cold floor

Yes, people also can't get equipment now because abuse of budget cuts, they are being asked to buy equipment themselves

The alert responder would have taken 40 minutes as they would be attending someone else, they aren't medically qualified to deal with things such as a stroke

If we could resolve social care, the NHS overnight would be transformed. An insurance based scheme will do nothing to solve social care.
Up to 10% of beds are taken up with people waiting to leave hospital. Nowadays even getting a hospital bed and commode delivered to someone's house is not quick. It used to happen within 24 hours. So even if relatives are willing to care for the person, there are still delays in the system.
Carers are so low paid and it is a hard job, so there is a real shortage of staff. Market forces does not seem to apply to the low paid.

similar thing happened to my MIL a few months back. i think it was 12 hours for a broken hip, on a hardfloor. relatives lifted her onto the toilet and then left her alone with unlocked front door as they had to go to work.

And the responder to the emergency button you wear round your next took about 40 minutes (so no good for anything really urgent like a stroke) and refused to put a blanket on her as it was outside their remitt.

It is not broken.
Health insurance schemes overnight add 3% to 10% to the cost of healthcare even if everything else stayed the same. You need staff to write insurance policies, sell them, marketing, collecting and processing payments, processing claims, and detecting fraud. The 3% cost is based on the most efficient insurance healthcare system, but most cost far more.
You also have co pays or excess to fund. So a £100 excess means you pay for GP visits (private GP consultation usually costs less than this) etc etc.
Insurance schemes benefit the well off and healthy. For those born with chronic issues they can be a nightmare.

The tories have been cutting health and social care budgets for years, we have been told to reduce the service we provide and haven't been able to recruit hone carers for over three years

No care at home packages= no one getting home from hospital= no available beds

Cottage hospitals don’t have theatres, orthopaedics, anaesthetists or high care wards all of which are required for a hip replacement following a fracture 🤷🏼‍♀️

The only solution I can think of is the return / boosting numbers of cottage hospitals. An elderly patient with a broken hip needs a different kind of care to someone with a life threatening injury, heart attack or stroke.

Yes they need to be taken to hospital safely (by trained personnel). Yes they need to be adequately cared for by a team who understands the complex needs of an elderly patients. But in this scenario a blue light is not required.

Cottage hospital with their own ambulance teams who can deal with these sorts of injuries and care. A&E stays as it should be - the place for people who need acute emergency care.

Yes it's broken and it's been collectively broken by the public, those who work in it and successive governments.

We need a social insurance scheme like those on the Continent. Nobody is copying the NHS and the fact that it's the best system is mythical.

Insofar as residential, elderly care is concerned we need a system that serves those who are clinically unwell and those who are socially unable to cope. For the former there shoukd be significant funding. Alzheimers is a disease just like cancer and there shoukd be help and support.

We have a family member in a fabulous nursing home. There was no wait to get them accepted there. It costs £78,000 per annum. Fortunately they have significant funds and it's mostly funded from occupational pensions (widows and the individuals). Not everyone has that level of quality care but everyone deserves it. If the money were to run out, the state would not fund that level of qualitative care. I would want nothing less for my mother or MIL.

I fear we are approaching a situation in the UK where the very best clinical care for cancer is not available at all or swiftly enough.

Poor Gran, I hope she's OK and been transported to the hospital.
There was a similar story on TV yesterday. This mans wife was 30 hours on the floor waiting, he ended up they just couldn't wait any longer, she was in agony for so long. She also had a broken hip but he wouldn't know that but suspected it. He managed to get her into his car and drove her there himself, which is dangerous in itself, but I can fully understand why he did it.
The NHS is broken isn't it.

I really hope that Wes Streeting and his counterparts in the devolved administrations can get to grips with NHS reform. A massive task, long overdue.

In my 30y as a consultant, I have seen different governments muck up different parts of the NHS. Even as a labour voter, I was not impressed by the PFI contracts.

One main issue I see is that community services have been destroyed. Without community support for physical and mental health, people’s health deteriorates and admission to hospital increases.

And don’t get me started on the ARRS initiative and PAs.

I do think there is waste in the NHS. We definitely need high-quality managers. There is no way a big organisation like an NHS trust could function without them. But I have huge issues with some of the posts that have been created. I firmly believe in embracing equality and diversity, but some of the initiatives have been a waste of time, especially seeing some of the low quality people that we have recruited in our trust. A good manager however can transform a service and we need them. The procurement service is restrictive, expensive and inefficient. We need to let staff order what they need without filling in forms for just one costly provider.

A few years ago in my trust, when we improved the CQC rating, all staff got a goodie bag. It was full of useless stuff with the trust logo on that I would never use. What a waste of money.

However, I do see the biggest problem with the NHS now as a lack of compassion and kindness. However, busy and stressed I am I will never take it out on patients or relatives or colleagues. Having seen how some of my NHS colleagues talk to patients, I am disgusted and appalled. There is no excuse for such harsh, dismissive and sometimes downright cruel behaviour to vulnerable patients. We should talk politely even to the rude patients, whilst being firm about boundaries. I will never excuse rudeness to patients and call it out every time, however much the NHS is crumbling around us.

I hope she finally got to the hospital, OP. I've been thinking of her today.

Yes it is irrelevant. But what is relevant is that too often when one interacts with the NHS, everyone is treated like sh1t and as if they are fully paid up members of the great unwashed with fewer brain cells than an amoeba. It should be the reverse and everyone should be treated respectfully and kindly.

If the NHS treats everyone the same, it should be in accordance with the highest common denominator not the lowest.

I've been twice to our local A&E. It is splattered with zero tolerance notices about patient behaviour. Sadly, having observed significant rudeness from staff towards patients (and other staff, including ambulance crew) I am surprised more staff aren't given a punch on the nose. Whilst I don't condone violence, I can understand why it happens in light of some of the foul behaviour which is frankly provocative.

My MIL has been in and out of hospital recently and they discharge her when they like. She hasn’t been fit to come home at any point, and we’ve said tbat so they’ve just sent her home oh hospital transport the next day. They haven’t done any assessments to see if suitable care is in place, and they know she’s the main carer for FIL who has dementia.

Last time she was admitted DS2 took her. He’s a charge nurse who is currently doing his masters degree in advanced practice. He spoke to the doctors about MIL, the registrar agreed with him about what she needed as did the nurses and the ward manager. We all breathed a sigh of relief thinking we were getting somewhere, then 48hrs later along came the consultant who decided she was fit for home so that was the end of that.

SIL had to arrange a couple of weeks in a care home as respite, at an absolute fortune, because MIL wasn’t safe to be at home on her own with FIL (he had to go too) as no family was available to look after them.

It’s a complete contrast to when my Nan was in hospital in 2007 but couldn’t go home until she’d been assessed for care. She didn’t go back to her home in the end, she went to a care home because she had dementia and kept falling so wasn’t safe. From being admitted after a fall, having the assessments and finding a care home place it took less than 2 weeks. Yet people say it was the same back then, it wasn’t.

This is not the fault of the ambulance or nhs the govt keeos cutting their budgets an organisation cannot work effectively with no cash flow the nhs ambulance fire and police are trying their best and critical people are not helping only go to mp if you hzve a solution to the problem or you will be disappointed

@LoveCherryTree hi OP, thinking of you and your Gran this morning . Hope she is now in hospital and getting treatment .

@knitnerd you have hit the nail on the head. HCA'S are inexpensive and swift to train. Regrettably they "do tasks" rather than nurse. They have not been trained to nurse, on the wards like the old SEN's.

Degree qualified nurses, some of them, are doing more technical jobs that require higher skill levels but again they do not provide old fashioned nursing care.

Who in the system is nursing nowadays? Calming a distressed patient, observing by look, touch and smell, communicating articulately with patients, relatives and doctors. I haven't seen much of that going on in recent years.

What's happened OP??