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 hope your mum is OK.

I voted Tory all my life until the election before the last one. I grew up in the 80s and 90s when the rhetoric was that the Tories were the people to vote for if you just wanted to knuckle down and work and pay their fair share of taxes. Whereas Labour would take away all your money and give it to those who didn't work.

I've broadened by horizons quite a bit since then!

I am politically homeless but I can't see how I'd ever vote Tory again. What they've done to public's services is just criminal. If they carry on it will end up privatised. It's awful.

Imo the NHS needs to be run by doctors and nurses.

a role, yes.

running it? No

the skill set required to care / treat someone is very very different to running an organisation

But presumably a lot of them paid taxes and NI all their working lives?

Well some of them did - but that money isn't sitting in a little pot with their name on it - it was spent years ago. The point is that the money to support the NHS and pensions and care homes, etc now is drawn from current taxpayers' contributions - and there are significantly fewer of them than there are of those in the boomer generation who need funding. It's an economic time bomb.

I think you could throw all the money in the world at it, and it would never be enough.

I work in a GP surgery, and I see every day that there are just too many people and not enough resources for it to ever work in its current form.

But blaming other generations still isn't the answer.

I agree with everything you have said except the UK birthrate is actually going down and has been for some time. It’s at the lowest now since the early 2000s and much lower than in the 60s for example. This poses another issue - less contributing to the public pot in the future.

@Fernsfernsferns
• consider and bring in new taxes on affluent pensioners. Both assets and income. It’s crazy that pensioners don’t pay national insurance when they are the main users of the system.

My MIL is over a hundred and in a care home, all her wealth apart from the last £23,000 ( I think) will be used up by paying for her care. She worked and paid into the system her whole life and always looked after her health. It annoying that someone who didn't pay in and didn't look after their health could be getting it all for "free".

I'm still pissed off that inheritance tax wasn't paid on the Queens massive estate and that King Charles gets to keep it all. Nasty greedy bastard.

Only 13% of call outs at our local ambulance service are for critical calls, 13%. You only have to watch the BBC Ambulance programme to see how many call outs are not necessary. The NHS needs a massive overhaul, money needs to be redistributed to match needs of the 21st century, and people need to be more self reliant.

More community support is needed for all the old folk, most who shouldn't be taken to hospital, and end of life care.

Comfortable with tax hikes. I earn at a level where I expect to take a big hit. Proviso is that it is spent ethically and not just spaffed on lining your mates' pockets with dodgy PPE contracts.

I also agree with better management for NHS but when you are in crisis mode, it's hard to see wood for the trees. 'Better management' is also just a guise for cost cutting and I disagree with that.

Oh right, the older generations part. No it’s really not blame like that anymore than looking up stats on increased care needs is blame.

It’s just a demographic reality that each society will be facing.

I'm absolutely not a Tory voter. One of the biggest issues for A & E is the lack of adequate GP cover, particularly out of hours. That started with Tony Blair and his government, when the GP contract was revised and out of hours cover was no longer a requirement of GPs. Since then nothing had been done to address this.

Many people who don't need A & E go there because they can't see/don't want to wait to see a GP. Throwing money at the NHS wont improve things. Proper workforce planning for the future along with decent funding will make the difference. Until we train the right people for the right specialities, nothings going to change.

Doctors and nurses can learn the skills necessary. They're clever people.

You need medically trained people running the NHS. They can take extra degrees and whatnot in management.

Filling the top spots with people who think they're running hotels is not the answer.

Thanks-yes agree with you, didn't phrase that well. I'm more referring to the birth rate / population size in comparison to the NHS creation. It was a much simpler model back then! But your are right definitely.

Nail on the head. I fully agree. The sooner we realise this, the better chance we have of changing to a better system. If we carry on thinking the NHS is wonderful and throwing even more billions at it, it WILL collapse. Far better to have a managed change to a more sustainable model. But whilst people and politicians continue to blindly think of it as a sacred cow, we continue to head towards collapse.

My daughter is an nqn and had 12 patients to watch at once in a&e a few nights back, she rang me on her break in despair, thankfully she got through the night as did all the patients.

Whilst the NHS is undoubtedly experiencing massive challenges I think it's important to balance the negative experience with the positive ones. Our family's recent experience of the NHS (which has been extensive due to my elderly father's multiple health problems resulting in multiple emergency admissions and long term stays) whilst not perfect, has mostly been reasonable. I worry that threads like these frighten people unnecessarily.

We need to fix the community facilities. People attend A&E because they can’t get a gp appt. People attend A&E in mental health crisis and the mental health facilities we have are not enough.
A&E is backed up because there’s not enough discharges at the back - no care homes or carers for people - people can wait months to be placed.
The whole system needs an overhaul.

This.

Its a scary possibility.

I completely agree. The problems with the NHS cannot simply be fixed by having a general election. We're in a lot of problems in this country. My MIL waited for 18 hrs for a bed on a trolley in a corridor after having had a stroke and been lying undiscovered in her house for 3 days. It was chaos.

Trouble is, those with the "skill set" aren't doing a very good job of it! At least medically trained staff understand the needs of patients and are usually highly educated so can learn management. In the past 25 years, patients have just become file numbers not people!

It is a demographic reality, but one that the government have been aware of for decades.

They should have been planning long ago how the country would deal with the situation.

What that would look like - I don't know - that's what the government are paid to do, and are failing miserably at.

A&E can’t be fixed until GP services are fixed. People have no access to the gatekeepers who give access to other appropriate services, so they end up in A&E.

Many GP practices now only deal with “urgent” cases - ie people who should either have been seen months ago, or people with minor infections who need antibiotics, or people who should be in hospital but managed to get an appointment in the telephone queue lottery, so were not obliged to go via A&E. In our surgery, you can’t even get an appointment to see the GP when it is the GP who sent you a message telling you that you had to make an appointment unless you phone up every morning at 8.30am after getting the message in the hope you get lucky and there are appointments available, or queue up at 8.30am to see the receptionists in person so that you can jump the phone queue. You cannot turn up at 10am and ask for a future appointment, as only on the day appointments are bookable, and they are apparently only bookable if your phone connects with theirs at 8.30am precisely, or you are at the front of the in-person queue - which of course you only will be if you are not actually an elderly, frail person with a terminal condition who wants to be registered for a hospice, or suffering from a debilitating chronic condition, or wanting to avoid being sacked from your job for taking time off just to get a doctor’s appointment which you might not be able to get despite taking time off work for it.

I’m not trying to be obstructive here. But how would a GE solve the problems?

im not in the Uk but our hospital here in Channel Islands is also slammed. Staff shortages. Overworked staff. Underpaid staff. People using it as a free doctors.

They had to shut an a&e down near me, at a large town. Not because of lack of need or even funding (so they say). But because of lack of doctors.

They can’t staff it. Because people don’t want to work for the nhs. That’s why there’s been strikes for better pay and conditions.

so all the people from that large town go to the next nearest one severely impacting that one.

Family member went to AndE last week (North of England), the largest emergency hospital over 2 counties- there was just 1 patient beside him, waiting time still for some reason..3-4 hrs.

He and other person had to stand in queue for 20 mins before giving their details, receptionist had gone to get coffee. It was around 1 am..

So far, so predictable. Yes, of course, it's the fault of all those people daring to get old.....it's nothing to do with (1) the mistakes of the Labour Party (news: the system was going to hell in a handcart when they were in) or (2) the Tories (who've nicely finished the job of destroying the NHS).

When will people on here stop criminalising older people for everything that's wrong? The older generation have worked and paid taxes, most of them are still paying taxes too. And we do PAY for the NHS in this country - something that's often overlooked, as though it's completely free and drops from the sky for us - it doesn't. Perhaps turn attention to the younger generation's behaviour on the subject of 'taking from the system' - such as the thread on here from a poster whose lazy partner chooses not to have a full-time job and instead uses foodbank vouchers? What contribution is that piece of rubbish making - is he 'taking from the system' - or is that different because he's younger?