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

Rhabdomyolosis is a rare but life threatening condition. Elderly people left laying for prolonged periods on hard floors are at increased risk. It is an emergency. I'm sorry OP :(

This is awful. As well as your MP, I'd suggest you call the local press.

Also increasingly older and elderly population.

@DoreenonTill8 Well yet another Government wants EVERYONE out at work. Ppl cant be in two places at once. https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5218375-to-ask-for-opinions-on-the-get-britain-working-white-paper

And does the NHS put its money where its mouth is and let THEIR staff have time off work to care for their own elderly relatives!!!

Children's A&E is no better, the country is in an appalling state. Wishing your grandmother a speedy recovery.

Too many people and not enough hospitals or Doctors.

None of the wars since WWII have involved defending England.

They are all attacking or occupyijg other countries.

Regrettably, there is a chronic skills shortage in the UK and we desperately need highly skilled people to do jobs that the local populations can't. Many of those highly skilled people are immigrants. Hand in hand with NHS reform we need educational reform so we can grow our own highly skilled populations. Often the children of immigrants do exceptionally well compared to the children of working class whites.

My grandfather was an immigrant, my father was an immigrant, my grandmother's grandparents were immigrants. My grandfather served in WW2, my grandmother's father served in WW1, her brothers died in WW2. All immigrants or immigrant stock (as am I) but perhaps we don't count because we are white.

I have a relative who works for SWAST (the ambulance trust here in the South West).
Like everywhere else our local hospitals often have long queues of ambulances outside waiting to offload patients and people have to wait ages for an ambulance.
But recently the bosses of SWAST, to save on staff wages, have drastically reduced the number of overtime shifts available. So there are loads of paramedics like my relative who want to pick up overtime to earn more, and there are ambulances sitting in the garage with no crews, because they won't pay overtime so that people who want to work can fill the empty shifts and crew those ambulances.

Quite often lately my relative has gone to work only to find they have no crewmate. They have to wait while control finds someone else at another station in the county who is also crewmate-less, then crew them up together so they can go out in an ambulance. Meanwhile several hours are wasted finding a crewmate and patients are waiting for an ambulance. Sometimes at night there's only one ambulance on the road in the whole county. The rest are either queuing at the hospital or missing crew. It's madness.

Oh no, not this again :( I am so sorry, this really should not be happening.

I’m so sorry for your loss. It’s heartbreaking.

Welsh Ambulance are negligent.

Is this in the UK? How do we call for a private ambulance (genuinely interested)? The only “private” ambulances I see are actually coroner vehicles picking up deceased.

To be fair, my mother is 88, born in 1936 and was 9 when the war ended. If the op's gran was born in 1926, she'd have been 19 and may well have served in WW2, if not in active service, easily from the age of 15 to join the many women who did what were then men's jobs to help with the war effort.

The public is as much to blame as governments and politicians. Even two or three years ago, if a MNetter dared criticise the NHS there was an almighty pile one. For decades the public have defended sub optimal services to defend the behemoth. Sadly, the public now has the service it deserves for worshipping the sacred cow.

It needs root and branch reform before it gets more money. Army of Equality Directors any one. My local A&E has a giant TV mounted on the wall, yet can't provide a digital screen to provide information about waiting times.

I appreciate that your job is stressful, but you shouldn't be so dismissive of families who are also at the end of their tether and can't cope with their relatives' care needs. If they are refusing to have them home it's usually because they are at breaking point with no support, or because having them at home has become dangerous. Properly funded social care is not available, which is no more the fault of patients and families than hospital staff. There are no winners here and making insulting value judgements about families isn't helpful.

Yep, that's not at all what I said. There's too many people and not enough services. The increase in people living longer and more people coming into our country is compounding that. It's not an 'us and them' issue, don't try and make it out to be.

Haven't read all the responses, so maybe someone else has already said this type of comment.... I'm a paramedic, have been for ten years, and I estimate 95% of calls I attend are so not worthy of an ambulance. Yes, a few are due to lack of GP appointments, more than a few are due to repeated mental health calls (as in someone calling 999 for an ambulance 20-30 times per month). However, so many are utter nonsense calls about things you wouldn't even bother a GP with, and others while possibly A&E worthy, are people choosing to travel there via ambulance rather than ask their partner, family etc to give them a lift, or go via taxi. IMHO, while there are clearly issues with the NHS, social care, etc. if people clearly abusing the ambulance part of the system in this way, stopped, then those needing it most would be far more likely to receive care in a timely manner. It's interesting to note than when us paramedics took strike action last year - and in reality, a skeleton service was still provided - the system was used in the way we all generally feel it should be, ie the vast majority of calls were emergencies, incl falls (if someone can't be moved for whatever reason, that's an emergency), and ambulances weren't taking hours to get to patients, or queued outside A&E depts. Think we need to reiterate to the general public what the ambulance service is actually designed for....

Your poor gran. 💐

She’s paying the price for years of hospitals tipping people out who can’t look after themselves - families are wise to it now. They refuse.

Rightly, no working family can take a demented, incontinent, immobile geriatric ‘back’.

Yes, the population is ageing, but the NHS created the bedbound army of social care patients. You would have thought they’d have noticed.

Just to add, he is now back home living independently at almost 97 so to those who are saying these people should be in care homes etc are not always right, grandad just needed help and the support wasn't provided in an adequate time...probably responding to some drunken idiots or the like

There have been other wars since the 1939 to 1945 one

So sorry to read this, what a mess we’re in. I hope she gets some help soon.

So sorry to hear this. The NHS is totally screwed, there is a domino effect, no ambulances because they are waiting outside backlogged A&E depts who can’t get beds on wards as people on wards are waiting for social care packages at home which can take weeks. My 93 yr old breathless terminally ill Mum sat on a hard plastic chair overnight in A&E last week for 14 hrs.

All those things are operational, nothing to do with the funding model.

I am not sure I understand ? the NHS has no control over private social care providers ? or local authority social care beds, completely different pots of money.
The NHS has run its staffing levels and bed levels at what can only be described as 'unsafe' for years now, this isn't new. The population has risen, the elderly population has risen, and the bed numbers have been slashed, but the figures are worked out on the 'well ill' ,(by some bean counter who has never spent a shift on the wards), those who need day surgery or can come in and be discharged quickly following surgery, which is great for those individuals, no-one wants to spend more time in hospital than absolutely necessary. However that isn't the main demographic the NHS treats as inpatients and to pretend it is, is a false economy.

It's a disgrace. I waited 14 hours in A&E with a heart attack.

I haven’t seen this great plan, could you link?
I’d be interested to see it.

I’ve been reading about increased digital appointments that will save thousands of trips to hospital, more community support, keeping people in their own homes & the 20 trusts with the highest employment inactivity to have health funding to get these people back to work but no actual rebuild plans.