This is so sad ( ambulance delays)

[Ratched]

Read this earlier and thought how terrible to be so aware that no one was coming to help in time....

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-61791151

The whole NHS is struggling. I needed a doctor for my Mum to prescribe some end of life pain medication (to replace what had just been administered), to obtain consent and cathertarise her as she was no longer safe to be moved to a commode, and to obtain a DNR consent.

We called for one on a Sunday about midday and it took 3.5 hours for a call (not visit). The prescription was issued to a pharmacy where he said he checked they had it, but on getting there they didn't hold that sort of medication. As he didn't attend the other two things couldn't be done, but he said the latter wouldn't matter in her case anyway.

She passed just before 6 that evening so, I guess, none of the above mattered in the end. It was a dire insight into the resource constraints they have.

We were also lucky to get a doctor out that evening to medically confirm her death. She arrived just after 9 o'clock but was driving herself, so not allowed to work after 11.

I read that earlier. That poor man. It’s heartbreaking.

It’s hideous but a reality . We can no longer rely on ambulances. If possible people need to get themselves to hospital in an emergency I think, even if it’s a taxi

This recently came up in a conversation with a GP at the end of my appointment. We live semi-rurally around 40 mins from the nearest A&E. He said that sadly he would always advise people to get to A&E themselves now if they possibly can.

I'm trying to convince my partner to move to a smaller area as I really worry about the hospital we live near to, it's clearly very over burdened and I think in the next five to ten years there is a real possibility he might need some form of emergency treatment and won't get it for that reason.
I'm also trying to convince him to be more conscientious about his health.
I seem to be failing on both counts.

I work as a nurse practitioner for a large community trust. Since Jan we have put together a team who go out and pick people up off the floor. We also see non urgent 111 or 999 calls to reduce pressure on ambulance services. The amount of people who cannot get a GP appointment is staggering, people don't know where to turn to. Older people falling is not a new problem but with the pressures on ambulance services and hospital beds it is becoming a very real problem We have know people to be on the floor for 14 hours plus.
It's a catastrophe.

I've just read this. Heartbreaking. Poor man knowing it was probably too late and so awful for his family knowing what he went through.

You always believe that if you are seriously unwell an ambulance will come. It is terrifying to think that isn't the case anymore. It's all very well saying get someone to drive or get a taxi. In a lot of cases that just isn't possible. Have you tried lifting a fully grown adult off the floor?

My 79 year old dad had a suspected broken hip earlier this year. He was in too much pain to move and could not weight bear. The ambulance arrived after 10 hours.

My dh & ds both have medical conditions that potentially need urgent medical attention.
We live a 5-10 minute drive away from a large hospital and in the current climate I wouldn't call for an ambulance sadly, if possible I would just drive them there myself.

The problem (where I used to work) is that people call the ambulance service for all sorts of stupid things a shirt and not definitive list of things people called an ambulance for On a very regular basis;

Toe pain at 3am
Batteries dead in tv remote
Wanted a dna test
Had an appointment at the hospital thought we were a taxi
Didn't have any paracetamol.

We had to go to every job as though it was life threatening because they said they had shortness of breath. Plus every time we ghastly to go to a call like that we weren't dealing with a patient who had a life threatening illness or accident.

Then you get to a&e and because elderly people are waiting for a package of care and the social care system is stretched be use they don't pay carers much and lots of leaving because Aldi pays more, there isn't the staff to put in the car package. So they're stuck in hospital 'blocking' a bed and you're waiting in an ambulance outside the hospital.

It's a domino effect.

Stop people calling for stupid reasons and sort out the social care system.

I'm no longer a paramedic, I'm now a nurse and it's not much better tbh

It's heartbreaking. From the article though it's not the lack of ambulances that is the issue, it's that those ambulances were not able to unload at A+E. I've had to attend A+E twice in the last 12 months. On both occasions it was something a GP could easily have handled. My GP chose not to the first time, the second time it was on a weekend and I couldn't get through to even speak to someone at 111. How many other people who were at that A+E the night this elderly man could not get an ambulance shouldn't really have been there but had no choice?
The call handlers are doing an impossible job. If you've got 1 ambulance available and you've got 1 heart attack and 1 fall we all know who is going to get that ambulance.

This is heart-breaking. That poor, poor man. And the guilt his son would feel at not driving over. It must be awful for the ambulance service too, imagine turning up after 8 hours - they would see instantly the old guy had deteriorated and wasn’t going to make it after such a long wait.

To die alone, in pain, slowly losing hope.

This story deserves to be read every day by the idiots in power in this country. It isn’t bad luck, it is appalling bad management of critically important services.

My elderly mum had to wait four hours for an ambulance after a fall but we were so lucky - i was with her, it was before Covid, and things were better back then. Even so watching her start to decline in those four hours was awful. Trying to keep her calm and warm. She wet herself. Her blood pressure went berserk (I had a cuff so I could take it frequently). We were lucky she only broke her shoulder (badly, it was smashed up but survivable).

So sorry @Kezzie200 😞
That stage of someone’s life should never be one with pain and stress and neither should it be for someone’s loved ones.

Unless you physically can’t, you should be getting in a taxi. This mis-use of ambulances has been going on for years.

Oh my gosh. He got to that age and then was left to die alone. Heartbreaking. Our NHS is in serious trouble. It scares me so much.

Our A and E usually has lots of people that don't have a doctor. But obviously that's why they go into triage.

What can be done?

That is so tragic. I just don't trust this govt to fix it. Wasn't the heath secretary just saying yesterday essentially 'there's no more money, fix it yourselves'? It's a disgrace.

I rang for an ambulance last week for my 5 year old who was having breathing problems at 7:30am on a Tuesday. We didn’t make the priority list. I’d used an inhaler on him, so by that point, he could put a sentence together which I think was the deciding factor.

Having never experienced a breathing attack like that, I was very concerned at how stable he was and what might happen if he deteriorated on the way if I was driving him. All was well in the end - I drove him and he was fine - but I still can’t shake that niggle that we may not have got the help we needed even if he was worse off.

It’s heartbreaking and anger-inducing in equal measure.

It’s happening up and down the country and has been for years in London, though certainly worse in the last couple. God alone knows how many people have died because of it, when they wouldn’t have done otherwise. That would be criminal under any other circumstances.

It’s not just the lack of care facilities stopping people getting out, though this is a big factor. It’s also how slowly things move in hospitals for inpatients. My elderly father has been in hospital twice recently, both times for almost a fortnight. Much of the time he was medically fit to leave but waiting for diagnostic tests to ensure nothing unknown was going on. Great they were thorough, can have no complaints there. But it took five days to get an MRI on one occasion and then another two for a 15 minute ultrasound. The tests he had done could have been fitted in to a day, but he was in a bed for at least a week longer than need be because of all the waiting time. So blocked the bed because of lack of scanners and staff. This must be happening up and down the country.

It’s a scandal.

There needs to be a 24 hour walk in GP centre in every town/city. They also need to have many more HV, based in health centres/GP’s, to give parents advice on nursing a sick child and common childhood complaints. And put HV’s back in baby clinics too.

Last year when my dad collapsed. We waited over an hour and he was deteriorating before my eyes. Suspected stroke but not all the signs, however something obviously very wrong. Ambulance told us time and again we were top priority. I was crying on the phone, begging them to attend (they live half a mile from the town ambulance station too so the sirens would come but drive past it was soul destroying).

In the end, fearing he was about to die in my arms I lied and said he had sudden chest pains. The crew turned up within minutes.

We later found out dad had suffered a brain stem stroke. He's almost died several times since then and is paralysed from the neck down, speech is getting stronger but very slurred. He'll be in a care home for the rest of his life (he's 67). I still wonder if the outcome would have changed had they got to him within 15 min, half an hour even. Could his outcome have been less severe.

Poor man. It’s so frightening and many more people will die needlessly as the NHS is on its knees.

Until we get rid of the Conservatives it will get worse.

This is absolutely tragic.
There are numerous things that could be done to ease the burden on hospitals and ambulances

1. Put a local mental health/addiction ambulance in place. Anyone threatening to take their own life, taken an overdose, collapse in the street from drinking too much could be dealt with by a separate team.
2. More minor injury units available for anything that's not life threatening. E.g. anything that can be dealt with with anti biotics, being strapped up or stitched.
3. Prank callers being fined, each and everytime. If it's kids, charge their parents

The amount of time and money this wastes is astonishing

On another note, a friend of mine (age 20) had been to the gp with shoulder pain, and told to see how it goes. she kept ringing them telling them it was getting worse but they brushed it off.
It got to the stage she walked to the shop with her boyfriend and complained of not being able to breath. An ambulance turned up, drove her home and sat outside for 20 minutes with her as they said it was a panic attack.
She died in the back of the ambulance due to their negligence. She had a pulmunory aneurysm and they'd chosen not to take her to hospital as it was busy.

I completely agree. The ambulances can’t unload outside A&E because A&E is full, nobody can be moved from A&E onto the wards as the wards are full, the people who could be discharged from the wards are often waiting for care to be in place, and there are so few carers it’s proving almost impossible to recruit so people can’t get home.

but there’s always money for a management consultant to come in for a vast fee and tell the staff where they are going wrong.

I mean I got deployed to the nightingale hospital in Manchester for a bit and then got moved back. If this isn't symptomatic of all things wrong with the nhs and the Tory's I don't know what is.

The director of the nightingale in Manchester was Dr Tony Redmond who is absolutely amazing, he set up ukmed and he organised the uks response to Ebola etc.

His book refers to it as ' as the conservatives have made the nhs various businesses under the heading of the nhs, irrespective of the experience and medical expertise on hand and the gravity of the emergency of which found ourselves, the dogma was that everything should be outsourced therefore everything was up for grabs, that dictated that a private consultancy firm should be inserted into the matrix just as they were with test trace and isolate debacle; a Parallel structure with limited if any medical experience. Some of who's senior staff were prepared to charge the Nhs £3000 per day plus vat however the value to the nhs is much less clear'

It's all about making private firms money whilst the little person gets left behind and patients suffer

I would think a good start might be some of those big gazebo type things they used for COVID test centres in the hospital grounds.

GPs with laptops. People triaged over to them if they don't need A&E.

Obviously there's a lot to sort out in the longer term though around fixing GP services and training to fill the skills gaps.

I called an ambulance for DH a couple of weeks back, he was in a cold sweat , shaking from head to toe and difficulty breathing .

Thought he was having a stroke , turned out to be Covid and he was admitted to hospital for 48 hours.
Ambulance crew said though they’d been busy all night , his was the only case where they felt the 999 call was justified.

Coincidentally, it’s the same trust that this poor man was trying to get help from .
Heartbreaking.