Horror I witnessed last night NHS

[ElisabethZott]

At 3pm yesterday I took my 88 yr old mum to hospital as she had an unexpected, sudden anaphylactic reaction to one of her meds and her tongue and throat swelled up to the extent she was struggling to breathe/talk/ swallow. I drove her there because I knew the ambulance wait can be hours.
I witnessed pure absolute carnage. I worked for the wonderful NHS for 30 years and yesterday I had first hand experience of the struggles the poor staff. I have never seen such a horrendous sight of so many trollies with extremely sick and dying patients lining the corridors. I couldn’t begin to count them but there were dozens and dozens. It’s only early November, I can only say, for your own sakes, unless you have a life threatening condition, do not go to A&E.
The staff were absolutely brilliant but there’s not enough of them. The care and kindness they showed us amazing. DM didn’t join the trolley queue as her airways were compromised so we went to the observation ward where she has stayed on a trolly overnight. All A&E wards were rammed to capacity with people not even having their own bay, they were just squeezed into any available space.
Once mum had steroids and anti histamines and she stabilised ( because they were working at full speed to treat other patients) the staff simply didn’t have to time or capacity to help mum. She was offered no water, no blankets no food ( her tongue swelling had gone down a little and she hadn’t eaten all day ). You can see by the tone of my post I am no way being critical of the fantastic medical team , they were pushed to the limits. I don’t really know the point of this thread except to say I am so worried what’s going to happen when winter starts properly.

Thank you NHS but you too need looking after too because you are really broken and sick

I think there is a need for a long overdue review of Carers allowances. I am sure a lot of people would take in an elderly relative or at least look out for them at home even on a part time basis, but they not compensated for being off work.
A lot of employers whilst on the surface they sign up to equality and disability acts / rights don't actually provide any support for people to be carers.
Carers allowance is about £76.00 a week - you can work but you are restricted I think you can only earn £100 a week.

Sadly I definitely wouldn't recommend the Royal Liverpool A&E on a Saturday night for reasons you can probably imagine. I'd be very surprised if the wait was less too, my relative (cancer patient) was stuck in A&E there for 3 DAYS a few months ago.

I feel sorry for the NHS

faced with treating one obese person after another with dodgy knees or difficulty breathing or heart issue or this that and the other

when all it would bloody take is for them to take ownership of their bloody health and look after themselves a bit more

Hilarious those calling for more personal responsibility. You do know that's what thatchers no such thing as society speech was about.
If we encourage dependency and handouts the systems fall apart. Society requires us all to take responsibility and look after ourselves, parent and pay for our kids, or the state has to do it all. We've got in that position again but this time it was the tories who encouraged hand outs and entitlement.
They need to turn away any more than 1 companion and fine if not. Tell people they are inappropriately at a and e and fine them and for gp. Not allow spurious complaints to mean malingerers get more care than quiet people who are ill. A lot more straight talking rather than only listening to the squeaky wheel.

Agree

The NHS is about a lot more than A&E. I am not disagreeing that your experience was horrendous but the NHS overall is not experiencing that level of crisis.

I am in the midst of chemotherapy at the moment and although things are obviously under pressure they are nowhere near overwhelmed. Vast swathes of health areas covered by the NHS are functioning well.

Two areas are of critical concern. The GP system whereby some practices make it seem so difficult to see a doctor that minor health issues sometimes become major and require a trip to A&E when they could have been sorted weeks ago if GPs were more available. And the other major pressures on A&E would be significantly reduced if we addressed cultural attitudes of how much effort we put into keeping healthy, looking after ourselves and each other, not doing stupid things like drinking way more alcohol than the human body can tolerate. The majority of the people you saw on trolleys were not dying. It does happen and every time it is a tragedy, but what is supposed to happen generally does happen and did happen last night - cases are triaged and the people who need admission and urgent treatment get it. The people who didn't really need to come to A&E wait around for hours. There are grey area cases in between and the staff cope as best they can.

NHS A&E would be perfectly fine on a Saturday night if we could do something about excessive booze culture. It's generally fine most other days of the week. If you are going to have a stroke, accident or heart attack then you are best iff not having it on a Saturday after 10pm but we don't get to choose our timings for these things!

Tories quote the 'record' sums they are now spending - but the % of GDP spent on the NHS has been less than the labour spend for the last 12 years.
(ditto the % on education, social services, justice & local government - that's why they're all broken. The real question is what have they spent it on instead?)

Well the NHS chomps through about £75bn more per year than 2016, so at least people can't say it didn't get that £350m per week that was splashed on the side of campaign buses. As it turned out the NHS spending has grown by much more than that per week
How much more do you think would fix it?

That 75bn is actual, not real terms, its less than a 40 billion increase allowing for inflation and medical inflation is far higher than CPI.

Money is wasted, why is output per medic falling? part time working has sky rocketed.

My DD works for a outsourced agency, she never got the £1500 she would have got had she still been employed directly.

She has 2 lots of HR, 2 sets of management, 2 sets of band 6's, some work T&Cs came across, some didn't, its a fucking mess, this company employs 100s of staff that used to work quite happily under the NHS but for accounting reasons was "outsourced"

We still spend far less per capita than most of EU.

@flipdiddle- that requires major public health interventions, investment etc. major health inequalities in UK. Quite the class thing too.

@YireosDodeAver I was there most of the night and witnessed just one drunk woman who was arrested and taking to police cells. The rest of the patients looked really, really poorly, a lot on oxygen. There seemed to be a lot of people with respiratory problems

Agree. Sorting GP access and providing adequate social care would hugely decrease the pressure elsewhere.
Sort out proper workforce planning for clinical staff so we have the right numbers in training to do the right jobs.

I kind of agree but I’m not sure about the hilarious part?

What makes you think that bit

Not the experience of my friends and family at all. Although I can only speak for Ninewells and PRI.

Also, health in Scotland is funded via Westminster.

@ElisabethZott re:respiratory problems we have a lot of people entering old age now who lived most of their lives in a time when it was very common to smoke, homes had open fires or solid fuel cookers and we didn't think much about air pollution.

So a bit of a peak coming I think.

Disaster capitalism. The Tories bring the NHS to its knees and sell it off in bits for profit. Money, power, politics- always.

This just sounds like two sound bites shoehorned together tbh

The NHS will still struggle if Labour get in, the demographic reality won’t change.

my son fractured his scaphoid bone (wrist) on his school residential. taken to the local hospital by his teacher, seen quickly and put in a splint with instructions for me to get him followed up locally. so far so good....

But originating UCC couldn't refer him to fracture clinic locally. no explanation why not, they just couldn't. Could she refer him to your fracture clinic? i was happy to travel as only and hour or so. no because his GP isn't in our area and it's the GP's (week the Integrated Care Boards) that are billed ultimately for the ongoing treatment.

rang the GP surgery hoping to speak to a clinician who could refer him into local fracture clinic. GP receptionist refused for me to even speak to someone because 'we don't deal with fractures or hospitals'. even me advising that i wasn't asking the GP to treat the fracture and reminding her that GP surgery's refer patients into hospitals every single day had no effect. just out right refusal.

i had a copy of the originating hospitals notes and the x-rays were uploaded onto a central system so i rang the local fracture clinic who said they couldn't accept him unless he had attended their ED and had x-rays performed by them.

so the next morning off we went to ED to be triaged so he could be streamed into UCC. sat for 3 hours. re examined, new x-rays which the nurse practitioner admitted gave poorer views than the originating hospitals images.

had to bring other son with me as his school had a teacher training day and their jobless father is far too busy with his new partner and her children to actually parent his own (while different thread!)

sent home with the splint again and referred into the virtual fracture clinic the next day (now the weekend). virtual fracture clinic said he needed to attend the hand trauma clinic on the monday. attended that appointment (both boys in tow as it was half term and above father didnt want his own children this half term because it didn't match new partners children's half term) to get examined and a cast.

it took to Day 5 to get the cast he needed in place. Scaphoids are notoriously tricky bones to heal anyway without these delays.

but what an absolute waste of resources! that's what the formation of Trusts and the introduction of the internal market has created. a totally unnecessary ED attendance with a delay in correct treatment.

So we were one of those families likely to be judged for 3 of us clogging up a rammed waiting room for hours all because hospital 1 wasn't allowed to refer to hospital 2.

all the staff except the GP receptionist were polite, professional and apologetic. i get it, i've been an NHS nurse for 30 years.

But the system is broken and that little example of one child with one injury but the whole mess that followed and expense is being replicated thousands of times a day.

one other thing, i made the follow up appointment with the hand trauma receptionist. i wrote it in my diary in front of her. she printed me out the appointment without asking if i needed it and i just handed it back and asked her to shred it as i didn't need it. how much paper and printer ink is wasted printing out appointments people don't need. just give them to those that want them. just a small thing but look after the pennies and all that.

There is obviously money to be made in some parts of private healthcare provision (generally healthy, working age people are preferred as they claim little) but I am not sure of the "run the NHS in to the ground, sell it off for profit" narrative.

Who the fuck would want to buy the NHS?

@Ginmonkeyagain exactly, people in very poor health due to smoking,poverty etc

If you think it will be any better under Labour you are deluded.

Here is Wales it is far worse and the NHS is under Senedd control. Should I be taken seriously ill I have asked DP to drive me to the nearest hospital over the border in England.

I've seen it like this at Lancaster royal when my daughter was taken by ambulance. Not our local hospital but when I was taking her to the toilet I had elderly women grabbing me trying to get my attention. I tried to explain you need to ask a nurse.

It’s ridiculous that gps are not open at weekends. That is half the problem. I feel for the staff and the amazing job they do. I hope your mum is ok.

Yep. That's certainly a part of the problem. Far too much money wasted on these wishy washy non jobs, which offer salaries comparable to that of an experienced doctor. It's insanity!

Our Chief Exec is (was) a nurse. All nhs orgs (I assume, certainly all the ones Im familiar with) have Medical Directors and Nurse Directors sitting at executive level, likely along with other clinically trained executives in various roles, alongside the corporate roles fulfilled by the relevant professionals (Finance Director, HT Director etc)

So we are 'run by doctors and nurses'. We're in exactly the same mess as every other trust.

Everybody thinks that the treatment for whatever affects them should be free.