Cat versus human a&e

Drs and nurses do not train ‘at state expense on the NHS’, nor any more. They pay. We all pay. Again and again, thanks to the greed of the well-off. That is part of the problem, it just is not worth it for working people any more and recruitment onto training courses has dropped off a cliff. Far more lucrative to be a cleaner or work in a supermarket if you have to work for a living. Or of course a train driver: they get better protections in terms of shift work and rest times too.

Hello Nigel, you know you're wrong. You're just being provocative. Thank goodness, in this country, people in A&E are seen in order of their need, not in order of their bank balance.
Cats and dogs are put to sleep every day of the week because their owners can't afford the vet bills - often even with insurance which becomes expensive and hard to get with older pets or pets with conditions - perhaps we should introduce that for people too?

your 10-hour wait is more likely to be due to inadequate resources dedicated to A&E, and quite probably coupled with people having difficulty getting prompt treatment in primary care resorting to A&E.

Its not just difficult getting prompt treatment in primary care. In some areas there is a real issue with people from cultures who don't have a GP equivalent and are used to seeking all medical treatment through hospitals. They often have a view that gps are somehow a poorer form of medical practitioner and will choose not to attend there even when they can access appointments readily.

We do pay. It’s paid centrally from tax with an organised efficiency that is supposed to make it cheaper. The NHS IS remarkably efficient, thanks to the many staff - primarily women - who work incredibly hard in poor conditions every day. The problem is that we are paying a fuck load of tax and it’s being sucked out by private interests. They have killed this country and various principles of equality, justice, democracy and law, it’s just like a chicken running around with its head cut off.

Your cat had you to drive it to the vets
obtain it’s medication, drive it home again, administer the medication and care for it while it recovers.

And therein lies the problem at the heart of society which is significantly impacting the NHS. We have an aging population that requires care and a lack of resources to support the current ‘care in the community’ model. Hospitals are full of older patients who are medically well but not fully recovered and need support. They are ‘bed blockers’ but there is no where else for them to go.

Successive governments have ignored demographic realities; we need more convalescence places for people who no longer require hospital care but still need to rehabilitate and recover. We also need care places for people who through illness or injury can no longer cope alone. Additionally, we need care places for those with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Spend some time with family carers and see what they do and how profoundly important these people are - and how exhausted and unsupported they are. It will break your heart.

There is an army of volunteers that drive patients to hospital, pick up prescriptions etc for people who don’t have family close by to help. However, many of these volunteers started when they retired at sixty; where I volunteer (just one day a week because I’m in my fifties and still working) many are now late seventies and no longer able to carry on. Where is the next influx of volunteers going to come from? Many are still working in their sixties and beyond through financial necessity.

Society is broken and the NHS is bearing the weight of decades of poor government decisions.

There are 2 A&E departments in my NHS trust area.

One is in a commuter town 12 miles away on a mainly rural road, the other is 8 miles away in a city. It's usually quicker to get to the first one (60mph limit most of the way), and far less busy than the city one. And the first one invariably has much shorter waiting times.

you do, its called BUPA you pay your insurance and get seen privatly. what are you whittering on about?

And many of us get that same service from the NHS. I've never not got a same day appointment with the GP. My parents have been not got a same day appointment with the GP. Same for my children. Same for my husband (different GP practice to me).

The problem with this is it means that all the doctors (who largely train at state expense in the nhs) choose to do paid work, and resource becomes allocated based on who can afford to may most as opposed to who is most in need of care. Do you realise that the £99 you're happy to pay quickly gets outbid by wealthy people with gold plated, extremely expensive insurance or deep pockets.

It is more effective is resource is prioritised to those who need it most, rather than those who can most afford it.

If you rush in to A&E with a grey baby struggling to breathe i guarantee you, you don't wait four hours to be seen.

I was recently taken to a and e with what turned out to be a very serious issue. I was left in there for 6 hours but the minute I was checked over everything went into overdrive and I was dealt with and admitted for 10 days.
What they and I didn't know because I had to wait for so long, was that I was about an hour away from full blown sepsis when I finally got the blood tests done.
If they had seen me sooner, would I have recovered sooner? I don't know.
I guess what I'm trying to say is the hospital itself and the treatment was very very good but a and e an absolute disaster. What to do about it? I don't know.

Imo, it would be utterly immoral for someone with a non-serious/non-urgent health problem to be treated before someone who is in urgent need of life-saving treatment simply because the first person has deeper pockets.

Assuming that there hadn't been something like a massive incident leading to multiple casualties, your 10-hour wait is more likely to be due to inadequate resources dedicated to A&E, and quite probably coupled with people having difficulty getting prompt treatment in primary care resorting to A&E.

I'm sure that, had you needed treatment urgently, you would have been triaged appropriately and been seen sooner. For something that can wait 10 hours, you may have done better to use your insurance for a private GP appointment.

I was in A&E on Tuesday night. It was far from full of "drunks and time wasters". There were people there from every walk of life (as far as I could judge in my own very unwell state). Elderly people who'd fallen; one young man holding his side with tears running down his face; a teenage girl weeping with pain in a wheelchair; a glossy model-type woman with beautiful hair and eyelashes, repeatedly vomiting into a bowl. (And me, lying on the hard floor because if I sat up, I blacked out.) The problem is underfunding and lack of beds - they wanted to admit me but said I'd have to wait for a while, so as I'd perked up a lot after some IV stuff, I decided to go home.

I think you've swallowed the Reform/Tory Kool-Aid.

And this that cannot afford it? Are they to receive shit healthcare while you pay your way to the front of the queue?
What happens to those people?
The existing system isn’t in a great place currently, admittedly. I have recent experience of an elderly relative waiting on a trolley in a corridor for many hours. I don’t believe the answer is in moving to a paid model however. The answer must surely be in improving what we have currently, process improvements, waste age being identified tidied and eliminated and more resources staff wise. Yes it will increase taxation or mean money is diverted from elsewhere but that’s far fairer than poor people being left to rot while rich people get great healthcare.

Just going to point out that I’ve been to A&E and been seen within half an hour, I’ve also paid £400 to see an out of hours emergency vet and had to wait 3 hours - it all just depends on how busy they are at the time.

Also you’re comparing what is effectively an out of hours GP appointment to A&E, I’ve had out of hours GP appointments, they run them in my local hospital out of A&E, I was given an appointment time about an hour later than my phone call and was in and out within 20 minutes with a prescription.

Twice I’ve had pets admitted to the vet hospital for emergency procedures - neither time did I pay just the insurance excess, because their procedure and stay went a few thousand over their insurance.

I am not in anyway arguing that the NHS can't be better. I am not arguing that it shouldn't be better. However please recognise that when you say "All Brits harp on about is how it’s FREE while they pay medical insurance for their cats. Most people have this cover, but won’t pay for medical insurance. Why?" You are NOT talking about "all Brits". I work with many people, who DON'T pay medical insurance for their cats. They don't have cats. They have kids and they often struggle to get food for their kids. I fully agree that we need to fund the NHS better, but please recognise that there are vast numbers of people who would simply NEVER be able to access health care without the NHS. It's not about saying the NHS doesn't need to improve, it's about saying that the bottom line is you can always sell a pet if money is that tight, you can't sell yourself or your kid.

This post is honestly the biggest let down, with it being MN I assumed someone had taken a cat to a human A&E. I feel cheated.

I had my cat put to sleep when she was 16, with an aggressive cancer. My cat had a far better death than my father with cancer.

I pay pet insurance for my two current cats - it’s about £50 each pcm. So £1,200 pa, but at the end of the day, I know I could have them pts painlessly rather than pay a shedload in vet’s fees, if I thought they’d suffer too much.

DH and I would be looking at £5,000 pa for private medical insurance, which wouldn’t cover our pre-existing conditions or trips to A & E. We can’t afford it.

As a human you can’t even pay your way to be seen in an emergency.

DD had an emergency appointment (last slot) a few weeks ago for something at our local private clinic. Our local NHS clinic said they couldn't see her until the following day, at the earliest.

The person who saw her was worried enough they drove behind our car, to A&E and then went and nabbed someone to draw bloods, get her admitted and through the system. We had blood results in an hour, which confirmed what the person who saw her had feared, and she was discharged the following morning with a clear treatment plan - all on the NHS, but as a result of our private clinic using their 'heft' to escalate the situation on site. The private appointment cost £120.

Pretty sure if we had gone to our local NHS clinic, they'd have just said 'go to A&E and wait' or if we had gone to A&E directly we'd have been sat there for hours, and that could have been seriously catastrophic.

Perhaps the NHS shouldn't be free. But equally, people shouldn't have to pay taxes to fund other peoples treatment/health and then have to go private themselves to get the urgent treatment they need. Just as the state school system should be good enough there is no need for private schools. People shouldn't have to pay twice because the state can't provide properly due to mismanagement.

Private hospitals aren't for A&E...
If you have a real emergency, you end up in the NHS with the same consultants anyway. Private healthcare is only useful to fast-track certain referrals basically but otherwise, the bottomline care for true emergencies is the same. It's not like in other countries where you do have two truly parallel systems.

And while you’re being seen first because you have money, the people who don’t ….just die? Good to know you’re happy with that

We have private medical care as sick of poor waiting times etc. But if we need emergency treatment we have to go to A&E.
I would prefer a us type system.

Honestly OP, if for you, the alternative would be going to a private hospital and paying lots of money to be seen in 10 minutes in a fancy consultation room, then crack on and find a private hospital where you can pay for that service.

For many of us though the alternative would be to seek whatever medical care was still affordable on the NHS, or to seek no medical care if all care was paid for, so yes we are lucky to be able to wait 10 hours on a trolley to get help and not die.