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

NHS frontline staff are usually good. It’s the management and basic organisation that’s crap and wastes money.
I had 4 letters (2 identical) pertaining to one appointment. Plus an email and two texts. Just the postage was £1.06 x 4. Multiply that by thousands of patients and you’ve wasted tens of thousands on just one instance on one day.

Ambulance delays because paramedics spending hours waiting to hand over their patient. In any industry would you pay a highly trained professional to prepare some work and then stand in an empty office for 6 hours to see if anyone turned up for it?

I do agree with your post but it worries me to see stuff like “ I can only say, for your own sakes, unless you have a life threatening condition, do not go to A&E.”

yes, people shouldn’t be going with really minor stuff. But the above message puts people off going who should be there. You don’t always know something is life threatening. I know of more than one person who hasn’t gone to a&e and died at home. They didn’t go as they’d seen media reports about 20 hour waits. They’d thought about going but had been put off as not realised they were that sick and not wanting to be a burden.

I believe Liverpool Royal ( the nearest large A&E ) has not got a long trolly wait but it’s a long drive on a Saturday with all the traffic and DM was struggling to breathe so I took her to our nearest hospital.
Our town has undergone a massive population increase in recent years with no thought to infrastructure,roads, we are in a constant traffic jam, hospitals, Gp services, dentists, schools

Completely agree. From a patient and an NHS workers POV it is horrific. My darling Dad died in hospital in April, lots of missed opportunities to save him and the care was neglectful - I keep saying everybody was too busy to care, never witnessed anything so awful. The Trust in which he died are now investigating his death as a Significant Event (meaning he came to an avoidable harm). I also work in an admissions avoidance community team where we have referrals in from the ambulance service, hospitals, GPs etc and it is carnage we simply cannot cope, staff are frazzled and morale is terrible. I have worked in the NHS since 1995 and it has deteriorated so much I am just counting down to retirement and wishing the next 13 years away.

This is outing but my DF had a severely broken and dislocated ankle last weekend, completely immobile (also has heart failure and dementia) and it took ten hours for an ambulance to arrive. The resources just aren't there.

Meanwhile, millions of pounds' worth of useless PPE for which the taxpayer paid Tory MPs' mates has had to be burned because it wasn't fit for purpose.

It’s simply that this country is becoming over populated and we don’t have the finances to support it. We need to close down the borders fast and toughen up to who we help.

No one cares about anyone else
anymore

This is what you get with a Tory government 🤷‍♀️

That said Friday night in a&e I would expect carnage whoever was in power.

It has been like this for years, and I have mentioned this many times on MN in the last (under different user names) but nobody ever believed me until recently. Even under Labour it was terrible, certainly in my area (not to be too specific but somewhere on the south coast).

My dad died in 2005, and my mum in 2008, both in the same NHS hospital, and it was like a war zone then, with people lining the corridors on trolleys, waiting for hours on the stroke ward to see a doctor, no post-stroke physio/speech therapy assessment for TWO WEEKS, filthy wards, staff too busy even to bring water to patients with renal failure….

Frankly my sympathy goes to the patients more than to the staff!

I hope your mum is OK now OP. Anaphylaxis is awful.

Last winter in my NHS Trust 21 out of 22 ambulances were queueing outside A&E at one point as they couldn't offload. We brought in new community services to try and ease pressure but it is like a tidal wave on sick people that we just cannot hold back. The social care system is broken and so this creates a backlog through the entire system, it is just awful to witness and experience.

I would stay with a family member these days as well, and would want one to stay with me. Apart from literally life-saving care, staff are simply too busy to assist with even the most basic of needs – using the lavatory, helping patients get more comfortable, getting water and letting staff know if pain or symptoms are getting significantly worse. We effectively need to provide the lower, but vital, level of care ourselves.

You know what would be great? If a live wait times clock was posted on the websites of A&Es and Urgent Care Centres so that people could make an informed choice about where to take their relative and choose a quieter A&E.

In my area we have three A&Es within a reasonable (30-40 min) drive, plus several urgent care centres, but it's impossible to know which one is quietest at any given time. It would be SO helpful to know this info in advance and would really help to spread the load.

The Tories have broken the NHS. May they rot for it.
Absolute nonsense. The NHS has been going downhill almost as long as it's been in existence. At its inception no one envisaged the demand as more and more conditions became treatable. Transplants, diabetes, IVF, to name but a few. For all political parties it is a useful political issue to beat each other other up with otherwise they would have set up cross party committees to deal with it years ago. Whomever is in power throws money at it but never really addresses the problems.

@CormorantStrikesBack yes, I agree, I worded my post incorrectly. Go to A&E if your condition could be life threatening as they are fantastic at dealing with acute situations but if possible take someone with you to help you access food, drinks and be your advocate

I’ve been to A&E 5 times over the past year (once for me with a DKA, the rest for the kids - an unexpected allergy, breathing problems) and that’s my experience too. By my estimate about half were drunks, drugs, people looking for drugs, and sprained ankles.

I was admitted with the DKA and spent it in a corridor. They did look after me well though and I was given water and a sandwich at least

What @CormorantStrikesBack said

I'm so sorry and I hope your mum is ok. And you!

Primary care has been devastated in this country, it's impossible to see a GP so A&E is the only way people can access care, AND people's conditions are left to reach a crisis point because they can't see a GP, so it's absolutely overloaded. And, preventative care is rubbish too. My GP has never once in 3 years invited me in for a general checkup or conversation about my health, the sort of thing that can catch issues before they get worse. In other European countries this sort of preventive approach is much more common. The NHS just doesn't work any more. It is so scary.

But it isn't just the NHS, it's all the adjacent services. The police are left to attend cases of severe mental health breakdown because there's no social and mental care service left to speak of. All they can do is put someone in a cell overnight or take them to A&E if they're injured and not dangerous. The elderly can't be discharged because there is no social care system to receive them. Successive governments have pretended to look after the NHS because it is the service that is most fetishized by this country, while quietly destroying the services that should complement it with their other hand.

This is not even ' winter pressures' any more, it is all year round in some places.
The problem is not A&E but the flow through the hospital. This is getting worse and worse.
In many areas, patients no longer have access to social work assessments whilst in hospital so if they need support on discharge and have no family to provide that, they have to wait for' health' funded care short term until they can be assessed by ' social care' at home, to see if they can afford to pay for their own care.
In our area, even if a patient already has a social services funded package of care, if they need an extra call, social care will not increase the package and they have to sit and wait with everyone else for a health funded package, to be reassessed once home!! This is a total bottleneck which means everyone sits in hospital beds waiting for the same limited care, which then gets reassessed when home.
The amount of families and patients who will choose to remain in an acute hospital bed awaiting a few weeks of free care rather than speak directly to an agency and arrange their own discharge is astonishing. And then they get cross with the ward when their relative gets a hospital acquired infection and does on the ward.
There are also many families who block the discharge of their elderly relative, usually parent, by refusing to engage with any plans as they think it is time for them to go to a care home, even when the relative has capacity and does not consent. At any one time in my hospital, there are several patients for whom this is the situation.
Yes....I do realize that politics plays into this too but my request would be that we're also take some responsibility to become part of the solution ourselves. There is only so much money can buy.
Try and have these conversations with your families. If you have a parent that is really struggling now, make a plan with them before they have a crisis. Arrange through the GP for a community Occupational Therapy assessment to look at making them as safe and independent as they can be at home and advise re care package if required.
Ask social services to assess their needs and see if they meet criteria for funded care whist they are NOT in hospital.
If they are in hospital and have over £23.500.00, just arrange the care privately and don't encourage them to block a bed just so they can get a few weeks free care. It may be your parent stick outside hospital in an ambulance next time whilst 10% of the beds are occupied with well people waiting for their free care.
And even more radically than all of that, maybe, of you have the space, take them back to your house to recuperate for a few days, or move in with them for a week or 2 to keep an eye and help as needed.
Yes, we all have busy lives but there is such an expectation that the state provide everything in our culture and it does shock me. Our staff from Indian and Philipino and other cultures where their elders are honoured and respected, are often horrified by the way our families do not look after each other.
Please make a plan and take any preventative measures you can to avoid unnecessary hospitalisation. There are enough beds to treat the sick in this country. There are not enough beds for the NHS Acute hospitals to be treated like hotels. Personally, I think if well patients were charged £500 a night to stay in hospital once they were fit to leave, they might find a solution a bit quicker.

Son and DIL live in Wales. That's run by Labour. Utterly horrendous there too.

We have this in Northern Ireland https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/emergency-department-average-waiting-times . Not sure how many people are aware of it though.

Misuse is clearly part of the problem, which won’t be solved by voting out the tories. We need a solution to waste by people going in when unnecessary . sure, gp services should be improved but some waste is not down to that

I'm amazed by the number of people who think that a general election and a new government will be like waving a magic wand and the NHS and all the troubles of the country will be fixed. They're in for a big shock. Where will the money come from?

@Sarahconnor1 could not agree more but it’s sacrosanct and it needs total reform. I started life my working life in the NHS and left after six years. It was a mess then and this is early 1990’s.

@RichPetunia attitudes to drug use and getting absolutely wasted have changed a lot since I was young. People have always done it but it seems more socially acceptable, especially drug taking.

Agree

We’re seeing elderly needs rise, it will get more pronounced

I'm always puzzled by these posts.

The last time I went to A&E, a few months ago, there were some people waiting, but there was no major drama, no people lying on trolleys. It was 6pm, midweek and there was calm focus, people were being seen. Displayed wait time was 3hrs 25 mins.

Our unit is an old hospital, located in a new town with a fairly substantial drug problem, and is the trauma centre for the surrounding area, not a small back water.

Maybe it's because you went at a weekend or maybe I've just been lucky?