To say stop moaning about A&E

This is what worries me. And I know it'll happen at my local (otherwise really good) hospital at some point. They are SO dismissive of anyone that doesn't have an immediate and obvious injury. There will be a death in the waiting room at some point. It's just a matter of when, not if.

Im an A&E nurse. for clarity.

A&E does not work for a lot of people now, because resources are so stretched. Teh corridors are now listed beds on computer systems for a lot of hospitals. However, there is no set national guidance on who is allowed to go on the corridor. In our case, its those waiting for pysio/OT/social care referrals and they are unsafe to send home but not eligible for a ward bed, patient being admitted but have been seen by that speciality and the treatments required are simple, such as 8 hourly IV antibiotics, any requiring close monitoring, continous treatments, oxygen, or are confused are not eligible to be placed there. Its awful for the patients, i promise you staff hate the corridors as much as patients, but if the wards are full, and theres a 30+ hour wait for a bed, what else are we supposed to do with patients we cant send home?

I will also add that not everyone is seen by the same professional. Not everyone can be seen by the same professional. And wait times vary because of this. So say its a suspected stroke. We could have 3 different patients come in with suspected stroke. Its night time. One is blue lighted straight to resus, they call the emergency phone on route, tell us suspected stroke, that then immediately called through as an emergency to the stroke team, who come to ED, generally a dr and a stroke nurse. They are immediately taken to CT and reviewed by them. Another comes in an ambulance, but its not blue lighted and flagged for on arrival, at ED they go to ambulance triage that is then flagged urgent to the stroke team - but they are with the one called through as emergency. A third patient comes in the front with family as they didnt want to bother 999 and understand the wats for the ambulance, so thought it best to take them themselves, where there is a wait for triage,after triage, even if triaged at possible stroke, and at a high triage level, there is a wait to be seen as a Dr then flags to stroke, who by this point are thromoblising the emergency patient, and have the ambulance triage one waiting. Then when seeing the ambulance triage patient, the emergency call goes again so the third in the front is still waiting, and deteriorating, and is now past the time limit for thrombolising. Also bare in mind - the ED resus dr is 1 reg/consultant dr - 8 patients with 2 or 3 juniors and the on call staff plus different specialities on call to attend resus immediately when paged. Ambulance triage 1 reg/consultant dr to 14 patients and 2 or 3 juniors. ambulatory, or the front is 1 reg/consultant dr and 3 or 4 juniors to however many are queuing on a given night.

Who is at fault there? Who gets the blame for the third patient waiting hours to be seen? Thrombolising isnt something ED staff can do, it is done by the stroke team, but the night stroke team is one reg and one specialist nurse. The specialist nurse can go and review by themselves, however, if they are needed to thrombolise, they cant.

Its the system thats broken, the staffing levels that are broken, the limited bed spaces available, the amount of people needing to use services, yes there are some bad eggs, but most staff are doing their best the keep theirs and their patients heads above water in a system that is causing them all to drown. its impossible. Some thing, such as a dislocation thats easy to diagnose treat and send home are done well and correctly, but so, so many other cases arent, because there arent enough resouces, be that staffing or bed spaces, to go round.

Sorry I voted YABU because I think you’re taking your one good experience and ignoring all the evidence that there is a real issue with A&E in the UK right now. But I do agree with you that A&E can be fantastic in genuine emergencies, and it’s also not the staff at fault when the waiting times are insane.
I had to take my DD for an x ray last year because she broke her arm, we were there about 4h including x rays and plastering, all the staff were lovely and no issues with the care we had.
However my elderly grandmother with dementia had 2 several hour waits in an ambulance queue outside, to then be on a trolley in a corridor for another several hours. Another person I know had to be taken in a car to A&E with a suspected stroke (which is an emergency) because they said there would be an hour wait for an ambulance. These issues are real and can’t just be brushed under the carpet because you had one good experience.
It does annoy me too when people go to A&E for non emergencies but also with the state of GP availability I can’t blame people for doing it if they feel there’s no other option.
People are allowed to complain about the state of the NHS because it’s not working and something needs to be done about it. But I agree that moaning and being abusive to hard working A&E staff isn’t the way

My friend died after being sent away from a and e.

he had severe sepsis.

the hospital paid out a lot of money in compensation but his widow and kids were devastated.

My experiences have been similar, and honestly if I compare A&E in the last 5 years to A&E when I was a kid 30+ years ago I would say that we spent a lot longer waiting in A&E when I was a kid.

My experience is definitely the reverse. 30 years ago, when we turned up there would always be seats available and we thought we were hard done by if the wait went over two hours. I was really quite shocked last time I went (fall resulting in wrist injury and broken nose) by the fact that it was just so crowded - I couldn't sit till someone kindly offered me a seat, and it was hard for people to hear their names being called. Ultimately I was out around 4.5 hours later, and I think I did a lot better than many who were there with more serious conditions.

My dad sat on a trolley for 16 hours in Rotherham hospital A&E with chest pain, back pain and vomiting. He had a further few days on a ward with very little intervention and was sent home. Another hospital was able to diagnose that he had had a heart attack! Rotherham hadn't done the scan that would have confirmed this so he had to waste the resources of another hospital. I would say your experience is probably a mix of luck and postcode lottery.

I didn't have a problem so everyone obviously must have had the same experience.

You sound like those defending Ellen DeGeneres "she was always nice to me" - of course she was, you're famous.

You had. fabulous A&E visit! congratulations! Amazing, happy for you.

I'll remind my 83 yr old mother, who now won't consider going to A&E because last time she went (turns out she had broken her back in 4 places), sat waiting on a chair for 7 hours (before leaving at 4am to go home) in tremendous pain in a packed waiting room. Dr finally rang to see where she was a mere 18 hours after she had booked in. 18 hours... she could have waited 18 hours to be seen by a Dr.

But its OK, because you was in and out in 3 hrs. Problems all solved obviously.

Most (not all) of my experience with actual, real emergencies in A&E for myself and family (unfortunately quite a few over recent years) have been diabolical.

I would say my then seven year old son was a genuine emergency. Sent to A&E by the GP with suspected appendicitis. He sat on a hard chair for seven hours, in a lot of pain and given no pain relief despite me asking several times. He was finally admitted but by then his appendix had ruptured. His recovery was longer than it needed to be had he been seen promptly.

My experience of broken bones is that because you are the walking wounded and not (generally) likely to keel over and die in the chair, that despite it being in many cases very quick once you get seen (x-ray, temp cast, referral to fracture clinic) the wait is very very long to get to that point. Yet there is nowhere else in my town that can x-ray. 2 minor injury units can’t do it, so A&E is your only option.

There really needs to be a very simple place to go for uncomplicated muscularskeletal issues eg sporting injuries, trips and falls in the otherwise healthy young (kids falling off scooter at low speed but putting hand out and breaking wrist etc) that can x-ray, splint and out again.

In comparison to breaking a bone in a ski resort where this is presumably very common where we were seen in the local village doctor, x-ray, splint, transfer from clinic to hospital, deemed not to require surgery and put in a boot. Injured at lunchtime and home before dinner, including the 2x 45 minute transfers from the regional main hospital. In UK A&E we’d not even been triaged in that amount of time. I’d pay the ~£75 that cost us with EHIC to have the same here. On return to the UK it became even more of a joke, as we couldn’t self refer to fracture clinic with the foreign notes/report, and the GP couldn’t refer to fracture clinic either because they couldn’t x-ray to verify it was broken, so we still had to go to A&E and hang around for hours despite not needing treatment to get access to the right department for ongoing outpatient care. It’s a massive waste. That GP and A&E visit could have been replaced with a phone call to the fracture clinic saying ‘foreign hospital told me to make an appt within a week with my own clinic, when would you like to see me’ and then saying ‘Tuesday at 10 please’ but because the whole nation is treated like children who can’t possibly know what they need everything has to go via the gatekeepers and sadly for too many things that’s only A&E.

For reference, I had a standard referral to a doctor at the hospital (a very good one) last week. As part of our chat, she said she was terrified of needing to use A&E.

If the medical staff in a really good medical facility feel this way, I think there is definitely a problem.

My mum nearly died in A&E, she had sepsis, she repeatedly used her right to ask staff to consider sepsis (she was shouted at by one doctor she asked), she survived but now has severe kidney damage that will reduce both her life expectancy and quality of life.

People moan when there’s something to moan about. Pretty obvious really. I’ve only been to a&e twice. Once with DD which was great so nothing to moan about.Once for myself , with a broken ankle , which was pretty bad so I did indeed moan. It’s not exactly rocket science.

My mother spent up to 5 days at a time in a&e recently.Sometimes she had a bed, quite often it was a chair or a trolley.She suffered from delirium and we had to stay with her 24 hrs a day, often holding her on the trolley.
She would be discharged from a&e and often readmitted from her nursing home the same day and the cycle would start all over again.
It was a relief when she finally passed away although we know it was due to her aspirating food whilst lying on a trolley being fed by a well-meaning but totally inexperienced member of staff.When they decided to withdraw treatment from her they suddenly found a ward bed for her to die in

I nearly died of sepsis due to an over 24hr wait.

I have several other stories about family members and their experiences that are shocking.

Glad you had a good experience but that doesn't magically erase the negative ones.

Most of the staff I saw were great... But that's the point. The staff are angels, it is the actual NHS that is broken.

We can absolutely complain and talk about what is wrong and what needs to change when ourselves and loved ones are not receiving adequate care.

Your post is just so ignorant.

So because you were lucky enough to get good treatment, the rest of us can sod off? I severed my finger in a fall. Six hour wait for an ambulance, then 13 hours in A&E for a single old (67) disabled person. It was only because I had a total meltdown after no treatment that a doctor even looked at it, and then he shouted at me for having delayed so long before coming in - that was after the ambulance was called within minutes of my fall at 10:30 am and the doctor screaming at me at 9pm! There were virtually no staff in A&E. It may not be their fault, but the system is broken and does not deliver the service it should. People are entitled to complain, and complain they should.

I think you have hit the nail on the head here. It’s the most medically complex patients who have the longest waits (albeit triaged quickly). The OP seems very smug about how her son’s case was “an emergency” but in reality, it was just simpler to deal with than most other patients’ issues.

We were in recently for 15 hours when my husband had a PE. We saw lots of simple injuries like non-complex dislocations come and go. The patients with no visible injuries (the ones who’d had TIAs, heart attacks etc.) were the ones there all night with us.

I am sorry for your experience and I really hope you are feeling better now.

💯

Oh this 100%. Such a ridiculous cult like attitude to people being paid for what they do, sometimes badly.
my mother was admitted to the day unit and ignored as she lay on the floor in agony. She was vomiting blood, and at one stage needed the loo. Staff vaguely pointed me to a wheelchair and then watched as I tried to get her into it and into a loo. They could not have been more dismissive. Transferred to a different hospital for surgery, forgot to send the medication she needed, that delayed the ‘emergency’ operation she had at 2am. She is convinced she would be dead if I hadn’t been there to advocate for her.

This whole attitude of the NHS being a sacred cow which should never ever be criticised, and all the people working in it being absolute angels is so toxic.

My DD dislocated her shoulder twice. No bloods where taken

I took my young child to A&E with a wound so deep you could see muscle and bone. There was blood everywhere.
My child was not seen for five hours. When someone finally got round to looking at the injury they were shocked, they were expecting a graze!
In the end the bone surgeon (forget their proper title) came to see them to confirm the wound could be stitched rather that waiting for surgery.
We were lucky and eventually my child was stitched up and we went home.
Most of the staff were really good and I couldn't fault them. It doesn't mean I can't be angry that a young child was left in pain, covered in blood and exhausted for five hours.

I broke my foot last summer two bones in the top, dislocated a toe fractured that several times and fractured the knuckle. The person on reception said that looks broken! The toe was pointing completely sideways.
I waited five hours to be seen then had to hop to x ray the other side of the hospital, because there was no one to help me or even a stick to give me. I then saw a doctor who told me my toe needed relocating but she was a vegetarian and too squeamish to do it. So I waited another hour for someone to do it. I was there around 7 hours in total.
I don't see how I could've gone to any other medical facility, we haven't had a minor injuries unit within a 75 mile radius for years so that wasn't an option.
Yes lots of people go to a&e when they shouldn't and seemingly as a family trip out. I live near a major hospital and have lots of friends who work there. To say stop complaining and just act like it's all fine does a disservice to the awful conditions they are working in, and how under resourced and under staffed they are.

singlewhitetrashheap

Far too many people go go A&E when they don't need to be there, staff leaving the NHS in droves, and people clogging it up that shouldn't be there, are why people are on the floor in corridors.

If you look on mn there’s constantly people saying‘should I go to an and e?’ and it’s because they’re afraid to be laughed at and sent away. I’ve rolled my eyes before at being told by the doctors to go to an and e and every single time they’ve been right (kids ending up being in a few days where mn would have said to just give medicine)

In Ireland a few years ago the government put out ads telling people‘better safe than sorry’ which I thought was absolutely brilliant of them, the problem is understaffing, not too many people

a few months ago I presented to the emergency department with a post-operative infection. I was very poorly and on the road to sepsis.

I was triaged very quickly and moved to majors. Where I sat on a hard plastic chair for 24 hours receiving iv antibiotics and fluids. I’d had abdominal surgery a few days before and have several conditions that affect my spine.

there were no trolleys or beds available. Just a chair in a room with ten other sick people in the same position.

after 24 hours the consultant came down and told me he’d admit me if he could, but there were no beds and I seemed sensible so go home (this was a Friday) and come back on Monday for scans and more drugs.

I was very poorly, luckily I took myself in even though I knew it would be bad. They were apologetic about the situation but every bed in majors had a very elderly person in it waiting to go elsewhere.