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

It is so sad isn't it.

My daughter qualified as a paediatric nurse three years ago, and has already left nurrsing.
She worked on the ICU in a children's hospital and it was stressful.
The unit was constantly short staffed, with acutely ill children- staff were often off sick with stress related MH problems.
Nurses working 13 hour shifts, and not even allowed to park within hospital grounds, meaning a long walk or a bus in a rough area .
My DD was so motivated when she started working as a nurse- but that has been beaten out of her in a very short time- she is moving on.

@IncompleteSenten

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

unlikely. And my Bil, a consultant general surgeon (I just text him and asked) just came back with a laughing face emoji as his response!)

I was involved in an accident at home last month. Badly injured and unable to move. I waited over 3 hours for an ambulance. Then we were stuck in the ambulance outside A&E for another 3. 12 hours in actual A&E till I was taken to the surgical ward.

Talking to the ambulance staff while waiting they said it's just too many people needing care, not enough staff, not enough beds. While we waited to get into the hospital more and more calls were coming through and they couldn't go help anyone as they had to stay with me. It was insane.

On the ward was no better. Seriously understaffed. and I had to stay in for 3 days longer than I actually needed because of waits for scan results that had to be sent to another hospital for opinion. What a waste of a bed!. I asked if I could go home till the opinion came back but they said no. Seems daft. Lady in next bed stayed in five days just waiting for a scan.

Its terrifying and I really hope I don't have to go through anything like it again

No they didn't. Blair wrecked the GP system with his new contract which paid GPs more money for doing fewer hours. What a surprise few signed up for the anti-social shifts! What a surprise lots worked fewer hours as they could get the same pay for working fewer days! You can trace the rot in GP services right back to Blair's disastrous GP contract which he heralded as "solving the GP crisis" - well that worked well, didn't it???

Our GP surgery doesn't even do blood tests anymore - they tell you to go to the hospital instead.

@TheLonelyGoatTurd
In theory they can leave after 45mins, most hospitals allocate a 'corridor nurse'. Or one ambulance crew will stay with 2 patients to free up the other crew. Sometimes there is no safe option but to stay and wait but these decisions get made by more senior people. Lots of arguing between ambulance control and hospital managers goes on!

A General Election won't change anything the NHS isn't fit for purpose it needs a complete overhaul ,that said when my son collapsed in February in severe DKA ( we had no idea he was Diabetic) his care was fantastic from the paramedics arriving in minutes ,blue lighting him to A&E ,straight through to resus ,he wss dripped up.and in intensive care within an hour .

And the first post sums it up perfectly.

I work in the NHS, admittedly in a clinical specialist area and not management but I am senior and I’ve been qualified for 25 years.

I love my job (mostly) but it’s hard and getting harder. The fallout from covid has been massive in terms of mental health problems, addiction, conditions associated with poverty and deprivation etc etc.

Throwing money at the NHS won’t solve it. It’s going to take years of work and a lot of common sense (lacking these days) to sort it out.

The NHS is struggling for so many reasons: lack of education in schools about healthy lifestyles, nutrition, basic healthcare and first aid meaning that many people have very little basic knowledge in these areas,

Not enough investment in early years support and CAMHS. There’s a lot of evidence about undiagnosed / untreated neurodiversity, esp ADHD leading to self medication with drugs and alcohol plus risky behaviours and lack of opportunity. It’s not always the “super power” it’s purported to be - (I have a DC with ADHD and I fought like a bloody tiger to get him treated but I had the resources, energy and confidence to do this - many don’t and these fall through the net).

More investment in MH - my area has seen a phenomenal rise over the last few years in MH crises. I do not work in a psychiatric setting.

We need more places for people who need short term care but not actual hospital - convalescent homes where community services can be assessed and put in place, freeing up acute beds.

We need to sort out nurse training and stop our continuous recruitment of overseas nurses and taking them from countries that also need them; they are largely amazing but why are we not able to attract UK school leavers / mature students into healthcare? Because of no bursaries, knowledge that it’s bloody hard and because of the academic requirements leading to a not-great salary but just above the threshold for loan repayments. Our Trust’s overseas nurses are lovely and we value them enormously but often once they’ve done the specialist course required for our environment they leave because the rent cost in the local area mean that they can only afford to live in rooms in shared houses. Once they want to settle down it’s too expensive (SE) and we lose a lot to other areas of the UK or abroad. They have mo family contacts or commitments so they are free to go whenever and I don’t blame them! One in particular was EXCELLENT but when he and his nurse girlfriend wanted to get married and start a family they went to a far cheaper (and nicer) part of the country in order to be able to do this. We can’t recruit into this level so we have to start the training process yet again in an endless cycle.

Staff with any degree of ambition also seem to get promoted into management roles without the necessary skills and experience meaning they have very little in the way of deeper knowledge and understanding. But there often isn’t anyone else.

There is so so much that needs to be done.

I wouldn’t train to be a nurse if I was 18 today even though I love my job and most of the people I do it with.

All the best to your Mum, OP.

Sorry for the rant!

So how come, in the circumstance that the PP outlined, where another hospital was quiet, why isn't there a system in place that sends the paramedics to the quietest A&E at the time (apart from circumstances where a patient could die at any moment, or where specialist equipment/staff is needed, obviously).
It's this type of thing that seems mystifying to those of us who don't work in the NHS.

But I remember as a kid, being in a corridor with my dad on a trolley, for absolute hours as the hospital didn't have space and was overwhelmed.
I remember my grandad having to get a taxi to A&E when he was having a heart attack as there were no ambulances and it was a 24hr wait for one.
That hospital was notorious for its waiting times, and a trip to A&E was at least an 8 hour wait. I then moved away from London and had to go to my local hospital and was surprised when I was seen, treated and sent home within two hours.

For some hospitals things haven't changed. But then I suppose they were badly run in the first place.

@Appleofmyeye2023
Yes I pay for my prescriptions. If I needed to have regular drugs, I’d have to transfer to the NHS because the system isn’t set up for private care: private prescriptions don’t get the same deals as the NHS so you pay more and variably depending on the pharmacy.
That actually illustrates the point why a proper private/public system could work as in other countries so that common pricing is applied and the most needy are properly provided for.

What do you think Labour will do though? Realistically in terms of how much funding you expect

The roots of the NHS’s issues are far, far deeper than the current Conservative government.

Can we stop pretending that pre-2010 the NHS was some kind of glorious utopia of effective and compassionate healthcare?

Thank the Conservatives who have done their very best to run the NHS into the ground 😡

Well the NHS chomps through about £75bn more per year than 2016, so at least people can't say it didn't get that £350m per week that was splashed on the side of campaign buses. As it turned out the NHS spending has grown by much more than that per week.

Yes, agree with this.

Plus layers and layers of poor, inefficient management which costs a fortune.

Plus poor staff retention rates.

And probably a host of other reasons that nobody truly knows how to fix.

It's naive to think that simply voting in Labour will magically fix all of these problems.

I think we should have a funded by the ‘patients’ drunk tank, staffed by qualified medics who just need to monitor and ensure nobody hurts themselves. It would need to be custody style, with locked rooms. Sadly, police stations have been sold off-for flats in my DH’s case-they now share with the council.

We called an ambo for a drunk woman one night, she was crawling along the road unable to stand, couldn’t speak English. Ambo refused to come out for a drunk. We had to leave her.

I went to A&E one night, bleed on the skull (anticoagulants following my first dvt). I had to wait for the drunk whose ear had been partially ripped off in a fight to be treated. I was in agony. Can’t lie, I felt a bit resentful.

My DH spends a lot of time on ‘hospital guard’ looking after mh or drunk/high people. I don’t know the solution but it’s not ideal when the whole shift is tied up dealing with those issues.

The bulk of NHS funding is decided in Westminster, not Scotland. In Scotland your bit of the NHS is in better shape than most parts of England.

A huge problem is that people who clearly do not need to go to A&E clog up the system. My son has a rare disease so I've probably had about 40-50 A&E visits over the last 10 years at numerous departments over the country. I see it time and time again that people who very clearly do not have had an accident or emergency is clogging up the system and they are the ones complaining and kicking up a stink when they have to wait 6-10 hours (no sympathy). Every single one of my sons visits were a medical emergency and on countless occasions we would even be accused of jumping the queue 😳 Start by educating the people what A&E should be used for and how it works. The care we've received in an emergency has always been excellent.

I’m not an SNP voter but I have worked for both NHS England and NHS Scotland mainly on the front line ED acute assessment etc and also been an inpatient and had extensive investigations in both. Trust me it is not the same in Scotland. I agree it’s bad in Scotland but in England it’s on a totally different level any HCP I talk too from England and now working in Scotland will agree with this.

No it doesn’t, it’s a lazy, ignorant reply. Explain why it’s just as bad in Wales and Scotland if it’s all down to the Tories?
The NHS has a horrific record of wasting money, it’s time they were held accountable.

Those saying that medics and clinicians should be managing the NHS - in our area they are already a core part of management team. Giving clinicians more management responsibility take them away form direct patient care - adding to the shortage of clinical resources. Most clinicians joined the NHS to provide clinical care - they don't want to be responsible for budgets, workforce planning, hr, estates planning, governance, performance management, pathway development etc etc.

The suggestion that somehow clinicians care more about patients than managers do, or that they are more clever than managers is nonsense and insulting. I'm a manager in NHS, educated to masters level with over 25 years experience. Patient care is at the heart of every decision I make. I'm part of a multidisciplinary management team which recognises everyone's input - but also allows clinicians to get on with what they do best.

Agree wholeheartedly that improvements will only be made when we recognise that this is a whole system issue - and not just a case of blaming individual parts of the system.

No better under labour, I trained in the 70s. Have worked in the ED(when it was called casualty) Taken in myself, cardiac issues Tuesday,by paramedic ambulance. Long Covid diagnosis, have had cardiologist consultant by phone, now awaiting tests. Three people in their early 20s in front of me in the waiting room, obviously boyfriend/girlfriend (she was the patient) all over each other. Female friend, laughing, shouting, giggling, every other word was"fucking". As Sarah Connor says,it's not a money issue,it needs a resort right from the top. Too many chiefs not even Indians. In the 80s, hospitals where I worked were still run by Nursing Officers,who rose through the ranks, like the military. We had the cottage hospitals,walkin treatment centers,all now gone. Bless your mum.

Doesn't matter how much it has grown if its not enough, and/or a lot of it goes to tory donors in private contracts for goods or services. We spend less than other similar economies per head, and procurement is corrupt, that's the problem. And has also been mentioned, cuts to police, local authority funding for social care and community support, and drug dependency treatments means the NHS is doing things it should no have to do.

The issue is our model was set up when the demographics were very different.

I absolutely agree - it is the same for the entire infrastructure of this country. It all needs looking at, as the whole system cannot cope.

I think that healthcare being free at the point of access does not deter people from coming to the surgery frequently with minor ailments which could be treated at home.

However, I think we have to be really careful to ensure people on lower incomes who do need healthcare are able to access it.

A large number of GP appointments are wasted by people who are entitled to free prescriptions - they don't want to see a GP for their issue, they need something which can be bought over the counter, but can get it free if a GP gives them a script.

I'm not saying these patients are doing anything wrong, just that there needs to be a solution - maybe change the system so these OTC meds can be given free to patients entitled to free prescriptions? Maybe scrap free prescriptions, but make the charge minimal for everyone?

Mental health - we absolutely need more mental health practitioners - that would take a huge pressure off GPs, and free up a lot of appointments.

There is no easy solution, and there are many issues, the above are just a couple that I see.