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 am scared for all of us. What happened to your mum is no surprise. My niece has cancer and she was home alone with her daughter when she began to roll on the floor and scream with pain. Her daughter phoned for an ambulance. 6 hours. Her elderly parents, one who had just had her cataracts done, the other deaf with poor vision, drove 40 miles at night, in the rain, to drive her a considerable number of miles to the nearest A and E. When they got there, the hospital were out of morphine … could not scan until the following day and it was all a circle of hell.

@TheLonelyGoatTurd
Ambulances have to convey to the nearest ED unless accessing a specialist service that isn't provided at the nearest, such as stroke, maternity etc....I appreciate it may seem counterproductive but even with a longer wait the patient is in a 'place of safety' allowing the ambulance to attend the next outstanding job.

Someone in power needs to have the guts to admit it’s never going to work in its current form and start looking at the French or German models.

This. Not a polarising we don't want a U.S. system so it's the NHS or nothing. Plenty of our European neighbours have healthcare systems we could try to emulate but the will isn't there.

I have a long term chronic condition that means I've been having outpatient treatment for more than 40 years. The NHS was not some kind of utopia under Labour governments, my care has ranged from mediocre at best to horrendous.

I think there's going to be a lot of disappointment at the lack of change in the NHS under a Labour government. There simply isn't the money with public debt as it is. We need to look at France and Germany and understand how we could improve the outcomes for patients and staff by reforming the NHS. What worked 70 years ago isn't working now and tinkering around the edges won't be enough.

I work in a GP surgery, and you would not believe what some of the ridiculous things A&E discharge papers say people attend for.

Some observations - it’s almost impossible to get a GP appointment for most things at the moment. I tried to get an appointment for DS for a perfectly sensible seeing the GP reason and was told that they can only operate an emergency appointments service at the moment so I’d need to take DS to A&E if he needed to be seen.

Trying to make sense of that logic is very difficult - primary care, emergency appointments, diverting non-emergency stuff to A&E. So, of course, they’re seeing ridiculous things on A&E discharge papers - it’s the only way people are managing to see a doctor at all. It is not easy for parents with no medical training to know what is and is not serious, or what they should do. That’s why they want to consult a GP.

While in the A&E waiting room (having been sent there by 111 - see below), I came across a child who had been sent to A&E for an ongoing UTI issue that wasn’t resolving with antibiotics. The GP sent them to A&E because there was no reasonable hope of referring to a specialist in outpatient clinic in reasonable time, so A&E was the best way to access a specialist in the GP’s view.

Calling 111 just results in an A&E trip. It seems to be a triage process that sends you to A&E regardless rather than a useful source of advice.

I need a letter about a longstanding condition I have so I can access a reasonable adjustment through work. But my surgery won’t issue one without me seeing the GP. And I can’t see a GP because they can only operate an emergency service. This is ludicrous. And counterproductive because the lack of reasonable adjustment exacerbates the condition. Between inflexibility from HR and a ridiculously overstretched GP practice, it’s all crap.

The whole system is broken. Primary care is profoundly broken and it will take considerable effort and time to fix things. The foundations of this problem were already in place before Covid, but now it’s absolutely fucked.

Remember those before and after Brexit ads that were shown during the referendum campaign? The before one showed a lot of people waiting for care, the after one showed people wafting straight through with virtually no wait. But when you look at the ad now, you become positively nostalgic for the "Before" version, it's still way better than what we have now several years after Brexit.

@truroballbag exactly. When the NHS was conceived people were not living as long as they are now with so many co morbidities and not all associated with obesity either.

the thing is those of us who work in healthcare are seeing the realities. Many people do need to take More responsibility and need to know the true cost of things. Many of the people we see at home continually remove dressings and so ulcers do not heal and then become chronic, they don’t listen to advice about elevating to help with fluid build up and to aid healing etc and so it’s a perpetual cycle I just don’t know what the answer is

🤣🤣🤣🤣
and do you really think it will cost you less to have a privatised or partially privatised system
want to go bankrupt paying for your cancer treatment like thousands do in other countries?
want to miss your insulin occasionally at end of month becuase you need to feed the kids lime thousands do in other countries?
the UK Spends less as individuals (via tax burden) than almost all other countries. Privatisation needs profit and we as individuals will have to pay for that

this government has already conned joe and Jane public into paying privately for pensions through auto enrolment, and thus lining the pockets of financial institutions with their fees and costs placed on very single individual - bloody terrific way of the wealthy making more money off backs of poor. They also then place the full burden of risk onto the individual- people are only just waking up to realise they can’t afford to retire when they thought they could as thousands wiped off their pension pot just now due to poorly performing markets. No one stood up and said, rather than telling everyone they have to autoentrol and contribute 5% of salary to a personal pension plan, we increased NI by 5%. Thus giving a guaranteed income at a more cost effective programme by spreading risk

that spreading the risk was fundamental to the whole concept of NI supporting the benefits systems, state pensions and NHS. But it is at heart a socialist concept that the Tories are intent on breaking. And anyone who has ever lived or worked a lot on USA where the idea of nhs is totally alien can easily understand why there are USA vultures circling around over nhs ready to take their pickings.

Thanks, that's interesting. Surely the ambulance isn't able to attend the next outstanding job though, as it's stuck in a queue for hours with a patient in it? Or am I misunderstanding?

At no point @DriftingDora did I blame anyone for getting old! I was merely stating facts. And yes, many of them did 'pay in', but actually that's irrelevant because a) that money was spent long ago and b) you can use the NHS, claim a pension, etc, whether you paid in or not and if that wasn't the case then we'd have millions of sick and destitute old people. But the economics of the boomer generation aging are pretty clear to anyone who wants to look at the numbers. And anyone who thinks that voting Labour in next autumn will be a magic bullet and everything will be okay once they're in power are in for a big disappointment.

And conversely, a relative who is disabled and has his elderly mum living with him, is now being pressured by the hospital to allow her home after surgery for a broken hip, even though she isn’t anywhere near fully mobile and they are aware he will struggle to care for her. They are taking the view that she has somewhere to go, so no reason for her to be in hospital. I was under the impression that hospitals can’t discharge a patient to an unsafe environment, but that’s certainly what’s happening here.

I am afraid many posters are naive and simplistic if they think a change of government will make a huge difference. The NHS is so huge and complex and is struggling to cope on any level. My experience is that care is brilliant when you do see nurses/staff but they are overwhelmed by the numbers and the number of hugely entitled people. There has to be radical change to the way it is run and money going into the right areas.

I have largely opted out of the system. My health insurance offers video GP calls and fast track to hospital care (private). For a long time, I resisted doing this as I felt I was buying care that others can’t afford. My medical friends urged me to use it and stay out of the NHS system - they said they’d rather the meagre funds go towards those who need it. When I cease having private health insurance linked to my profession , I’ll be back in the system just as I get older and more frail.

That said, most of my medical friends have left the NHS, partially or fully. They can’t bear not giving the care they want to give and can give privately.

The truth is that the NHS is already dead, with many wealthy people including our leaders opting out like I have. This is incredibly unfair. We need to be mature and consider a system which is part public and part private which actually works.

There are doctors and nurses leaving the NHS in droves because of pay and conditions

I bet loads of them would want to make the transition to management.

Or make some medical training and real life understanding compulsory for top management and doctors and nurses as consultants and advisors with actual authority not shoved in so they can say look we take advice look a doctor is here too...

Something can't be repaired if people won't acknowledge it's broken. I know it's a medical setting but sticking plasters just can't carry on doing the job.

There is a massive problem with the management of the NHS. The policies, the priorities, everything.

Many other countries do it loads better than the UK but like trained seals we've been conditioned to clap and bark "envy of the world envy of the world ."

The only thing the world (governments) envies about the UK is how willing the population is to bend over, take it up the arse and apologise for not providing the lube.

Similar here. My dad died after 11 months of waiting for a neurology appointment.

If you are on about leighton hospital, it's a shambles, I was there not long ago with my 6 month old, suspected meningitis, after saying the blood test came back fine, they sent us home after being there for 11 hours, only to call me the next day, to say something came up on the blood test, so clearly they hadn't had all the bloods back when they sent us on our way, we then had to go back in and we were there for another 14 hours in the waiting room. Not ideal with a baby

I think we can thank the Tories for this. The issue we have is the Tories are deliberately running the NHS into the ground, and the country for that matter. No one can see a GP, dentist, get help with social care, so where does everyone end up.... A&E. there are not enough provisions overall, be that NHS or private. People in this country can't even get care privately for things like dentistry. There simply isn't the infrastructure to deal with the number of people in the country. So the Tory rhetoric of privatising the NHS won't work as the private provisions are not in place. Health care generally needs massive investment. Things will only get worse the more this government try to sell it off.... privatising utilities has worked really well nearly fifty years on.... all the raw sewage being pumped into the rivers and hosepipe bans the second we have good weather....

@Appleofmyeye2023

I never suggested privatisation as a solution, nevermind the US model.

At least half of those people don't need to be there. A Labour government will not change that.

Do you pay for prescriptions privately?
what are your limits on your health scheme- do you know them?

People were dying on waiting lists during the Blair/Brown years too!

My father suffered terribly in 2008 - languishing in hospital beds whilst waiting for an operation for a cancerous growth - month after month as his operation kept getting cancelled at the last minute. By the time they operated it was far too late and he died shortly afterwards. They moved him between different hospitals to "reset" the waiting list clock. Smoke and mirrors rather than actually meeting waiting list targets!

this government has already conned joe and Jane public into paying privately for pensions through auto enrolment, and thus lining the pockets of financial institutions with their fees and costs placed on very single individual

This is a very odd view. You can opt out of auto enrolment immediately after you join so how is that a con?

It's intended to encourage people to save early for a private pension and gain the benefit of employer contributions and government tax relief. It is a positive not a negative and there are rules about fees charged on these pension schemes.

If you want to rely solely on the state pension, you simply opt out. Or you forego the employer contribution (although not always) and open a SIPP so you get the tax relief and can choose your provider.

You’re not misunderstanding. The paramedics who attended mum had to wait most of the afternoon in the ambulance with her until there was space for her trolley in the A&E corridor. Then they had a further long wait for triage so they could hand her over to hospital staff and be on their way. People don’t appreciate that ambulance staff can’t just dump patients at A&E and leave !!

A labour government won’t stop people scoffing shite and getting obese, with all the health conditions obesity comes with

a labour gov won’t stop people drinking excessively, with all health conditions excessive alcohol intake comes with

a labour gov won’t stop people getting older, with all the health conditions aging comes with

It's fairly obvious that the main problem is staffing. When I was last in A&E I was sent off to the Urgent Care section which seemed basically to be for injuries like fractures etc which weren't life threatening. It was a big ward with around 10 cubicles in, staffed by one harassed doctor and nurse who were having to do everything including taking people for X-rays, sorting out the printer when it played up, minor dressings as well as much more complex treatments and examinations. Unsurprisingly, the waiting areas were heaving. If that ward had been appropriately staffed for its capacity - or if it had just included clerical and portering staff and, say, and extra nurse - it would have worked way better.

There really has been a noticeable change in the last few years, and Brexit clearly does have to bear the blame. When my mother was alive, I spent a lot of time with her in various A&Es and hospital wards. A&E was never as bad as it is now. What was noticeable was the fact that the NHS was extremely dependent on foreign staff, and I remember thinking then that we would be in big trouble without them. Now that they cannot so easily recruit even basic staff from the EU, let alone medical professionals, the gaps are really showing.

What would make sense, of course, would be to allow asylum seekers to work, thus helping both with staff shortages and the issue of the expense of the asylum seeker system. But that would be too sensible for this government.

I find it really sad that people say ‘GE now’ or Tories out. It’s going to make no difference whatsoever. The issues with the NHS are far bigger than any party.

We need a public debate about its future. The nhs was not designed to cope with this level of demand and expansion in the last thirty years beyond urgent care has created this crisis. We simply can not carry on as we are.