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

What repercussions would you like there to be?

Where did I say that I would like there to be repercussions?

Tbh there’s no excuse for for your poor mother not being offered water and blankets, both of which would take little time on the part of the staff. I’ve had the mis fortune of experiencing a lot of hospital visits with various family members over the last two years, and find there is a distinct lack of empathy amongst nursing staff. Kindness like giving patients at least blankets and a drink of water isn’t the fault of the government, but more about the ethics of people paid to look after us.

I agree with what you're saying, and situations like this shouldnt happen, but maybe it's not about kindness or ethics.

Perhaps nursing staff are trying to look after so many patients at once, and are so overstretched, that sometimes things unfortunately get missed?

I spent Friday in A & E in Croydon with an elderly relative. Just wanted to say that it was a fantastic experience. She was given a recliner chair on arrival. We were offered chairs to sit by her. She was offered food and drinks every four hours and was not just treated for her presenting issue but visited by other therapists too. We saw everyone around treated promptly and staff were courteous and professional - especially the 3 security guards dealing with 2 rather challenging patients.

Have witnessed NHS struggling on other occasions and have every respect for staff dealing with such challenging conditions but it really was encouraging to see it working as intended.

In many healthcare systems, if you miss an appointment you get charged the full - eye-watering! - cost of the appointment.

The problem is, though, that this would never work in the UK because the UK appointments systems seems to be so chaotic, and means of communication with HCPs difficult and time-consuming, that there must be a significant proportion of patients who miss appointments for no fault of their own. I once received a letter advising me of a hospital appointment the day after it was supposed to have taken place!!

Why, in this day and age it is not possible to do this by email, with automatic text follow-up/reminder? Similarly, having to phone the GP surgery to make an appointment seems archaic.

@PaminaMozart so under such a system, should someone like me, with neurodivergency-related executive function issues which mean I regularly cannot get out of the house, and long term health issues, and limited funds, therefore avoid making appointments because I know I will miss st least a third of them no matter how hard I try so I would have to wait until I had saved up the cost of the likely fine before attempting to consult a health professional. That doesn't seem a great idea to me.

One of my health conditions got exponentially worse because I couldn't cope with the additional barriers put up to seeing a gp during covid, I felt too overwhelmed to engage and didn't see the gp for 2.5 years by which time things had got really bad. It's stupid and broken but please don't advocate for making it worse by fining people for their lack of functionality.

Thank you everybody for your good wishes for my mum. Happily she’s home now but sadly she is so weak she cannot walk without full on assistance. She needs a commode and a zimmer and she has been discharged with neither. I’m on my own and I was diagnosed with cancer 18 months and I can’t cope. I’m going to have to phone the physio team for an urgent assessment but in the meantime I’m “it”

D'you know @EasternStandard , I really don't know how much it would take. I'm a gardener not a Tory politician.

It's not working and they're the guys who are meant to have the answers and we're left with this shit show.

Are you actually defending the current level of health service provided by the Tories? Because there are very few people who are not suffering in some way because of it. My husband is currently on a cancer waiting list. Life long tax payer, never had much cause to use the NHS until now, in his late 50s.......waiting.

She has also been discharged without any replacement for her Ramipril so I’m going to have to chase that up tomorrow. How do people manage that have no relatives? I do not want my children to have to do this for me

I would like to get past a few empty posts and talk about what we can do because I think it’s a real problem. And going to get worse, mostly due to demographics.

It’s not actually about politics as much as just starting a conversation with a degree of realism.

Also population health which is poor. It’s a shame there’s no change there, or even conversation on it.

One thing that bugs me is the posting again and again that the state does nothing for people. I just see ultra high financial support and extra NHS funding. It’s massive and going up year on year. State dependency is also huge. And complex care at end of our lives is huge. So all this uptick in payments and funding and it’s as if there’s very little.

So in answer to your question whoever can actually talk about this stuff I’m interested in.

On your husband that sounds hard, the whole set up will suffer more strain if we don’t even talk about what’s causing the problem though, a model that was set up at another time. Which is very successful in some ways, but we have so much more difficult care as a result.

@vdbfamily has got it spot on.

Too many entitled patients and families holding up the system. Plan ahead and take some responsibility for your families.

@EasternStandard

Ok, so here are some ideas

The UK could increase its levels of spending on healthcare. The UK currently spends a lower proportion of its income on healthcare than many other countries including Germany, Sweden, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Austria.

It's not true that the state state does nothing for people, but they are doing less than other countries, they aren't doing enough to tackle the problems we are all witnessing. We see the problems. They see the problems. We don't see them doing enough to resolve the problems.

Do you think the government are talking to other countries to share ideas on how to tackle the problem of healthcare in a world where the demographics are causing financial strain?

The UK could increase its levels of spending on healthcare.

Where does this come from?

Where do other countries get it from?

Labour's magic money tree of course.

Or their alternative cry of "tax the rich". Trouble is "the rich", such as doctors earning over £100k reduce their working hours to avoid the punitive 62% marginal tax rate and punitive tax charges on their pension schemes. Or people like that go abroad, not just for higher wages, but also to generally lower tax countries!

They have different funding models usually.

Where do you think Boris Johnson thought he'd get the money from for the (imaginary) 40 new hospitals? Did he think there was a magic money tree?

I posted about this upthread.

as you say, we can’t tax working people any more than we already do.

we have to tax affluent pensioners more, but their income and assets.

and we have to reform benefits pensioners get so they are more targeted and means tested.

reform the triple lock.

winter fuel allowance is paid to everyone over the age of 65. £500 a year each. Costs about £3bn I think. Many get it that don’t need it including my affluent parents.

that should have been changed years ago. It doesn’t because that demographic votes and the Tories are spending tax payer’s money to buy their votes with it.

Fairer, more sensible and more coherent tax/benefit regimes!

The UK tax/benefit system is crazy, illogical and unfair. It disincentivises "working harder" in so many ways though tax cliff edges, stupidly high marginal tax rates at certain income levels, etc. On what planet is it right that a pensioner with an income of £50k pays less tax than a worker on £50k (because of NIC which is, in reality, a tax!). Why do we take so much off a part time worker who gets an offer of an extra shift - more tax and they lose benefits at certain income levels - no wonder they say no!

We could also get HMRC to actually start to target tax evasion, especially in the black economy which they seem to ignore these days, i.e. "cash in hand" work, selling duty free fags and booze, small businesses not registering for VAT when they breach the (stupidly set) threshold, etc. Other countries have a zero VAT threshold so all businesses have to register and charge VAT - the UK were, I think, the only one that doesn't!

Agree with all that. Pensioners with higher incomes/higher savings need to start paying their fair share instead of the burden always being on the workers (thanks Blair and Brown!).

Idk what the tax / benefit split is elsewhere and state dependency rates

Maybe it’s the same but it feels high here

Plus the last few years eye-watering financial support from the state

And we are unhealthier, sadly

we can’t tax working people any more than we already do.
Why?

Pensioners with higher incomes/higher savings need to start paying their fair share?
In what way do they not?

Pensioners with higher incomes/higher savings need to start paying their fair share instead of the burden always being on the workers (thanks Blair and Brown!).
Why is this the fault of Blair and Brown? If it is, their fault, why have the Conservatives not changed this during the last 13 years?

The tax burden is often higher in other European countries, though it has climbed a lot in the U.K. in the last decade.

BUT all those countries and the US have similar issues with demographic change (lots of older people living much longer) and not enough money to fund the care they need.

they have this problem in the USA too - as the state their does fund older people’s healthcare - and likewise they are not taking in enough taxes to pay for it.

my DH is from a European country with a healthcare system widely seen as better than the U.K. (and returning national can’t just use their system you have to pay taxes there for a while before you can use it and get your costs refunded). BUT he reckons long term their problems are bigger. As the problems aren’t seen yet (system just about coping day to day) and their expectations and so costs are higher. And the French go bonkers and strike at any idea that anyone should work longer and pay more tax - they had a near national strike over raising the pension age there last year.

macron is trying but looks enviously on how the retirement age here has been raised several years already with barely a murmur of dissent.

The taxes on working people are already having negative effects - as noted above disincentivising higher earners working more, taking so much out of working people’s pockets it’s pushing the U.K. towards recession.

combine with increases in mortgages over the last year (thanks to the Tories!) spending power among working people at all income levels is falling.

EVERYTHING is difficult when that happens.

pensioners and tax. There isn’t enough money coming in to the system to pay for everything we want. So either we have less or worse (eg healthcare or social care which is what we’re getting now) or we raise more money.

to the above we are hitting the limits of what the state can get from working age people without creating bigger negative effects.

and working age people now are paying proportionally more than boomers did when they were working. And housing was cheaper.

yet there isn’t enough money.

so the ones with the money need to pay more.

And all the stats show that affluent boomers ARE the ones with the money, both income and assets (they are not suffering with mortgage hikes but they are sitting on massive capital appreciation they didn’t earn, they got lucky).

why do YOU think working age people should pay for everything?

all of this is the fault of every govt we’ve had for the last 30 years.

so more the Tories fault than labour as they have been in Govt more.

also the right wing presses fault for constantly telling people they can’t expect a great welfare state AND low taxes.

we can’t. It’s one or the other.

now it’s time to choose.

as I said upthread either boomers pay more tax or they get crappy health and social care.

it really is that simple