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

The nurses and doctors are all leaving to do beauty treatments unfortunately.
The last few years have seen so many set up doing Botox and fillers but also skin peels and other beauty stuff, these new regulations are going to make things so much worse.

With that and the Tories being in charge the NHS is doomed.

@cocksstrideintheevening and please explain how the current government will fix this given they have had thirteen whole, long, excruciating years to improve these services? Thirteen years. We need reform, that's something can all agree on. If you think our current government will give us this, without marching towards the workings of the US system (already seeing this with numerous private health insurance ads running at the moment), I would like whatever it is you're on.

I think such programmes contribute to the issue to be honest. People watch them and think “oh, so for that situation I need to call an ambulance out.” Those Tv programmes need to do much more to educate viewers in the right course of action for each event. It would be possibly to do it sensitively without apportioning blame to any of the patients.

Not “every”

but many many many

I moved to the town I live in in 1996. I registered my self and my then young children at a large local practice. There was never any issues with getting a GP appointment for many years.
Out of interest, after reading this thread last night, and googled the practice.
I was surprised to read that they actually have more GPS now than they did when I joined.
Can anyone shed light on what the hell all these GPS are actually doing?

If not PFI this time, where will the extra funding come from?

@J3llycat I can't, I don't think anyone can. Its fundamentally broken which was my point.

I want to understand what labour would do to 'fix' it.

I'm not a Tory voter btw.

You're very lucky. Ours can't even be bothered to open a full Monday to Friday week! They close early on Friday at 1pm and don't open at all on Tuesdays! No evenings and no weekends.

Our practice have three times as many, BUT, all but two are part-time.

I don’t think this is all a gov problem. Sure it is in terms of pure cash. But apart from that they have very little control. We straddle two ccgs. One is absolutely fantastic. The other is beyond a shit show. Sadly our ambulance allocation is the shit one so if you have cardiac arrest here you’re likely going to die. This has been challenged many times. Apparently the must meet target (ie cat 1/ cat 2 times on average) not per postcode. We aren’t out in the sticks. The size of our town is larger than the combined size of the two largest towns in the other CCG.

They're working part time. That's the problem. We have several in our surgery group who only work in the surgery 1 week a week and a few just do a few half days.

No one wants to go back to GPs working 7 days, 100 hour weeks, but when part time working came in, the Govt and BMA should have made provision for training up extra GPs. If the average GP is now working, say, half hours, then you need twice the number of GPs to provide the same cover. So obvious, yet Blair didn't seem to plan for that and the BMA a few years later actually voted not to increase GP numbers and to object to new medical schools.

It was entirely foreseeable 20 years ago, but no one bothered to foresee the entirely foreseeable!

I wish people would understand this.

In Wales, they gave £155 million back to Westminster at the end of 2021 because they didn’t even know how to spend it.

The Welsh NHS is in a worse state than England. They are run by Labour; they had extra money; they gave it back 🤷‍♀️

Somebody explain to me how we think that more money is going to fix that.

Are Wales part of AFC?

@KnittedCardi wasn't that one of Blairs tricks, along with f*cking up NHS dentistry?

Not seen any detail as to how Labour will reform the NHS. Seen a fair bit of them promising to increase funding though. Sounds like more of the same "let's keep filling the leaky bucket" rather than actually tackling the fundamental problems with the NHS.

Like most things with Govt, the NHS needs radical reform. So does the tax system, so does the education system, so does the justice system. For decades, politicians have been papering over the cracks because they're "too hard" to deal with. We desperately need some enlightened politicians who are going to tackle these hard issues. Otherwise, we'll just continued to slide into deeper and deeper decline. And no, "more money" isn't the answer - it's part of the answer, but only alongside radical reform of virtually everything. We can't continue borrowing - the country's interest bill alone is more than our education budget!

But she said it was for a cut that would be sorted by a plaster, not a deep laceration with a risk of tendon damage/infection.

This is why I roll my eyes when Brits sniff at the US system. I had an ambulance to my house within 4 minutes (seriously!!) when my infant was turning blue. These threads make me terrified to ever return to the UK because the healthcare from the GPS/Dentists all the way up to the specialists is so over stretched.

I’ve needed A&E a few times recently and been seen within one hour every single time.

The NHS isn’t fit for purpose anymore and it’s devastating. It’s been a slow burn but this is the worst I think it’s ever been. It’s not normal.

I'm a huge supporter of the NHS, but it has problems that I don't know if money will solve. I don't understand them or how to fix them - it needs some kind of business analyst to understand. I'll tell you an illustrative story that will be a bit of a novel, but its too Kafaesque and insane to condense. Here goes.

A couple of years ago I had a short acute illness and was briefly hospitalized. After analysing my latest bloods, the consultant hummed and hawed for a bit then says, "okay, I'll let you go home, but you definitely must see your GP and get follow up bloods within the next two weeks." Great, says I, very eager to leave - perhaps I should have gotten more information at the time, but I was knackered and just desperate to go home. So a couple of days later I ring my GP:

"What bloods?" they say. "Who ordered them? We have no idea what you're talking about, you'll have to ask the consultant." So I ring the hospital back (for every "ring" in this story, assume at least an hour of trying to get through/on hold). The hospital claim no knowledge of me or who I am. They tell me to get my GP to order bloods. I ring GP. GP says they can't order bloods and I need a form. I ring hospital back. They've remembered who I am, but cannot order a form. I tell them GP said to ask them. They tell me to ask a different hospital that apparently has a lab. I do. That hospital refers me back to GP. GP refers me back to intial hospital (well over 2 weeks have now passed, maybe a month). I consider giving up, reasoning that if anything were seriously wrong I'd be dead by now. Eventually the hospital does provide me with a form when I just walk in and wait until they produce one. However, my GP cannot do the bloods. The tests are finally performed at the third hospital (with the lab) and sent to me GP.

The GP then tells me he can't tell me the results because of data protection.

I was pretty much laughing/crying by the end of this process, it sounds completely unbelievable, but every word is true. What the fuck happened here? Why? Would more money fix this? Imagine an elderly frail person trying to navigate this, or a person with mental health problems? Would more management help? Less management?

This makes sense, there are so many things wrong with the way the nhs is run, it’s not all about funding.

Pretty much everything that's wrong with the NHS, including dental surgery or lack of, and my own personal hatred of Blair for banning general anesthesia in dental surgeries, can be traced back to his 1997-2001 government. People will say "oh, but Labour haven't been in government for the last 12 years. It's all the Tories fault." Yes, it is, but the Conservative party stopped being conservative when its MPs knifed Margaret Thatcher in the back.

In Wales, they gave £155 million back to Westminster at the end of 2021 because they didn’t even know how to spend it

Sorting out the abomination that is Betsi Cadwaladr healthboard would have been one way to spend it. The state of healthcare in Wales is truly frightening.

I can.

They are seeing a patient every 10 minutes during their working day. They are sending referrals/completing paperwork outside of this time as it is not factored in during their working day. They are overworked and exhausted. Sickness levels for GPs is high due to this, resulting in even less available appointments.

Their patient list is increasing daily, demand for appointments far outstrips the number of actual appointments. GPs and their team are facing increasing abuse from patients who wonder what the hell they are doing. All the while dealing with their own personal shit, the same as we all have to.

I wish you could see behind the scenes at my work, that would certainly shed some light as to what the hell they do all day.

The state of our NHS is dire. It’s so sad. We were once a nation so proud and appreciative of our health service. It’s the system failing - not the fault of our amazing doctors and nurses.
I don’t think NHS dentists will exist much longer - our clinic has now gone private and finding anywhere in our entire region that accept new NHS patients is non existent.

Yup, the plan has been to privatise it. My USA fiend pays 500 quid a month for heath care!

Has the population of the town stayed the same?