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

Oh no way. Doesn’t sound fair 😬

In full agreement then. Sidestepping health really bugs me, and even more when a virus was hitting us harder due to it

All of our managers were ex nurses and mainly hopeless.

I suspect this is not so much the Peter Principle (being promoted to one’s level of incompetence) as being successively kicked upstairs. There is a type of nurse who is very good at talking and writing a good game but whose clinical skills tend to be mediocre (they are usually bad at people skills too, at best remote and at worst bullies). Such people are usually loved by insecure bureaucrats as they won’t challenge the status quo, and their subordinates can’t wait to get rid of them.

I am a healthcare professional working on the older peoples’ medicine wards. I’ve just come back after maternity leave and I didn’t think it could get much worse before I left. It’s awful, and just yesterday I burst into tears telling my partner about the state of the place. To those that have to come into hospital or are bringing their family members in to be treated; you have every right to complain, but please don’t take it out on the staff, we are NOT okay with what is happening! We do not think it’s acceptable to have too many beds in a bay so your bedbound mother is stuck in bed, with no privacy and no hope of getting sat out in a chair, or your elderly father is in a corridor being ignored and his drinks, meals and pad changes not being done…no dignity and no respect. I implore you to write to your local MP about your experiences.

How awful for your mum,I hope she's feeling a little better now. My father was taken into hospital by the paramedic team and from the moment he was picked up from home to the moment he passed away (3days) I can't fault the NHS. I have had 2 episodes of cancer and again I can't fault the NHS,very quick.We live in the Midlands if that makes any difference 🤷xx

Not by selling our gold reserve at rock bottom price . You’ve only got to look around the county places ran by Labour especially London , bit by bit it’s a pit . Do you even know the exact amount of specials schools Labour closed ? I had a young son functioning at nursery level whilst he was going into year 4 , forced into a mainstream school . Labour is no longer for the working man

Sorry but how long does it take to give someone a drink of water and throw an extra blanket on them? Seconds. Basic nursing care.

Where I live our hospitals get full but not to the extent that the staff can't cope they cope really well and never leave a patient without a drink or something to eat no matter how busy they are , they are fantastic.

Where are you @Pepsiewomen ?

I care and always will! I was a nurse for 40 years up until I had a huge seizure and woke up about 3 days later in Intensive care and was told that I had a brain tumor, which later turned out to be cancerous so I couldn't get back to work due to memory problems and risk of seizures!

That's true! It takes no time at all to get someone a glass of water at the very least. I have always had a better diet as an inpatient than at home thanks to my family bringing in drinks and snacks and the staff always provide 3 meals a day! At home we only have one meal a day as we can't afford to eat 3 times daily!😭

Focus people! The government are trying to spin, ‘we have employed thousands of new staff into the NHS’ who? Physicians associates, Associate Anaesthetists, read up on them, they can’t do bugger all except triage which a nurse is much better qualified to do, but are being given more and more autonomy, please educate yourselves, you pay for this. You are being sold a load of bullshit. These people are not medically trained, are earning almost double what our qualified hard working ’junior’ doctors are being paid and our ‘junior’ doctors have to take responsibility for the actions of these people who I reiterate are not medically trained. I for one will not let any one of them anywhere near me and neither should you!
Educate yourselves!

Find blanket store empty, due to lack of portering staff to stock it up

Bleep linen or general porter, but no one answers due to lack of staff

Bleep Housekeeping who don't know where the porters are and don't have the key to the linen store in some dark end of Distribution

Keep bleeping the portering staff, while all the admin tasks add up, because there's a chronic lack of ward clerks

Other patients are now calling for help, but you're the only qualified nurse in a ward full of CSWs

Send one of them to another ward to find a blanket or two

Answer phones

Follow up doctor/specialist nurse/physio/occupational therapist/SALT/IDT referrals

Chase results for discharge

Chase pharmacy bags for discharge

CSW might come back with blankets

Forget water

I wish I had the same feelings toward NHS staff as you.
My 13 year old daughter has just had emergency surgery to remove a 2.5 kg tumour and right ovary. It grew from a ping pong ball size in just 3 weeks. My concerns were dismissed at A&E on October 14th and despite the paediatric surgeon palpation an unusual mass at that time she was refused a scan despite voicing serious concerns. I also fobbed off as being anxious.
She in the best central London specialist hospital now but she's had an invasive laparotomy with a lateral scar from the sternum to the public bone at least 16 inches long. When it was small it could have saved the ovary and the tumour removed with keyhole surgery.

Apologies, some typos in my above post.

No apology needed. Good luck to your daughter and the rest of the family.

I absolutely agree about all these "associates" .... I have had bad experiences. It is a farce. One tried to give me an inappropriate medication, and I had to ask her if she was a doctor, as it was obvious to me she wasn't.

My experience is that they proudly declare themselves as "Physician Associate". I've never known so many Physicians.

Sorry this happened to you. Push for sone egg harvesting for your daughter from the remaining ovary, so that she has at least a potential back up if something occurs with her fertility as an adult. I know it’s not a panacea to harvest eggs but it’s a bit of insurance.

Yes. I have done that already. But it could have been saved if the "Wonderful NHS" had done their jobs properly when she first presented at A&E.

As long as people can be fobbed off by blaming immigrants and refugees or time wasters/bed blockers it will only get worse. It’s popular to blame pen pushers but the admin doesn’t just disappear if you lay off admin staff. Adult and community social care has been neglected across the country so A&E are taking the brunt. Sickening people are on here to defend the people in charge because it’s elections next year.

Ah, I only have 28 years' experience.

My mother is in and out of Ninewells frequently, and PRI occasionally, and I'm completely bowled over by how much better it is in comparison to what I see here in England.

Obviously this is anecdata.

Yep, I saw a nurse practitioner with severe abdominal pain. He arranged for me to be admitted to a hospital maternity ward via A&E for an exploratory scan that same day. When I finally got onto the ward and saw the admissions registrar, he asked me to point to where the pain was, which I did and he immediately sighed and told me it wasn't a gynae problem because it was too high! He said it happens a lot with nurse practitioners!

Yes, but admin IS a massive problem. My OH has to phone around several different depts every sodding month for his repeat chemo prescription for his cancer. That's nearly 3 years now. They've never had it ready on time and it's nothing to do with clinical staff. It's just incompetent administrators. He never sees clinical staff on a regular basis except for the blood test which is done by a health care assistant. The delay is always some administrator (one dept or another) who hasn't ticked the right box or the hospital pharmacy who forget to order the drugs. When he actually sees or talks to an actual cancer nurse or the oncologist, things get done and mistakes aren't made. They sound just as fed up when OH points out to them yet another admin cockup. In fact, most of the phone calls he has with the cancer nurse are admin matters - that's a massive misuse of a highly qualified/experienced specialist cancer nurse, but it's the only way to get heads banged together in the admin depts.

Well, we have to wait for their manifesto don't we but Wes Streeting has said preventative health is the way forward, together with reform of NHS.

But what we do know with 1000% certainty is that the Tories will do nothing, they ve allowed the present situation to develop.

As for taxation, we have Fuel duty, Tobacco duty, Alcohol duty, i'm, if we really wanted too we could have Fast Food duty too, try to be more imaginative, VAT isn't the only tax in the Govt armoury!
we also need to do something about the amount of litter these places generate too.

The sugar tax is extremely low, 18p per litre.

Over 60% of UK adults are overweight and or obese, i doubt there is any correlation between weight and voting intentions, do you?

I was in hospital 7 years ago and it was a nightmare They nearly killed me 3 times Luckily I had a good carer who spotted it but no one in the outside world believed
me !! Too late now