A&E crisis

[mumsthewordi]

i am shocked to see the images from the wards, particularly impact on most vulnerable. Is this just the reality of a health crisis under any government, or do we think Labour have something to answer for?

@Porcuporpoise he used his magic wand to find money for the unions and to send a few billion more to Ukraine so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect him to find extra money for the NHS.

I assume Wales NHS is all good at the moment?

@spuddy4 not unreasonable at all but however much money is found it's not going to improve matters right now is it? Improving healthcare takes time.

Money doesn’t immediately magic up qualified professionals and safe/effective systems in a few months. This was always going to happen. Fixing the NHS starts with funding but that’s 1% of the journey. But yes, I agree with you that adequately funding the NHS (and education) should be prioritised.

It's multi factorial but a major one is the publics overwhelming inability to cope with the concept of being unwell.
No one is prepared to be even slightly inconvenienced by illness and expect the NHS to fix it immediately.
I work in urgent primary care co located with an a and e department, .last weekend was busiest on record...at least 50% of patients didn't need a doctor at all...and the majority of the rest didn't need to be at an urgent care center, could have waited.
111 doesn't act as a filter at all.
Pharmacists seem to tell people they need a doctor at drop off hat.
All these services just reinforce the publics belief you must seek help for every cough, fever, sneeze, pain
Until we have a government that will tackle this "Amazon prime" attitude to healthcare ( I want everything now) we will continue to see these winters.

I used to work in the hospital and see people come in for stupid reasons that could be dealt with at their pharmacy or GP.

A parent saying their child had developed an earache after school that day. It was only 5pm so she must have brought them pretty much straight there.

Next was a man who ‘had a bit of an achey back for the past 6 months’.

A woman with a barely visible red patch on her hand. Blink and you would miss it.

People used to come in smiling, grinning and acting excited to be there.

One of the first things the Tories did back in the early 10's was to close our excellent medical walk in centre. I strongly suspect the funding wasn't transferred back to A&E or out of hours GP's.

Add to that a few thousand extra homes in our town (this is fine, people need new homes), Brexit, Covid dealt with badly, austerity and almost non-existent MH services and our A&E is rammed.

he used his magic wand to find money for the unions

Are you including in that the BMA?

The NHS is such a toxic environment in so many ways. We have many Doctors in our families who find it impossible. Our local GP surgery has gone from 12 GPs (half partners) to 2 Partners 2 other perm GPs and lots of locums.

Our local Urgent Care Unit (alongside A&E) has queues coming out the door.

There are multiple entrenched failings across the NHs. One of the doctors in my family who is a surgeon said contracts can sit with Purchasing & Supply for close to 8-12 months before being considered. This is equipment he needs to perform his operations!

What can and should they be doing now to prevent winter deaths

It's not difficult to find what they e said the past few weeks about the NHS. As recently as the other day Streeting made announcements about their aims to cut waiting lists.

It is a disgrace.

To be honest, I think Labour have some of the right ideas but they are, like every elite group, far too blasé about what is going on, in the belief that it won’t affect them or their families, as they have a combination of money, private insurance and contacts in the medical field.

They really should treat this as a national emergency, using both the private sector and armed forces to help. And any strike action of any kind should be made illegal until the NHS is at least basically functioning again.

I doubt they will do any of the above as, politically, a few hundred or thousand totally unnecessary deaths of the poor and old would have less effect on their popularity rating than genuinely tough emergency action.

And, longer term, they need to expand medical school’s tremendously and incentivise more nurses into training.

To be fair, sometimes we don’t know we don’t need a doctor until we get there.

I don’t go, or take my kids. But I’m confident and reasonably clued up on things medical. ihave done first aid courses. I go by the ‘is it getting worse or staying the same’ mantra. I don’t feel I’m neglecting my kids if I let them wait 24 hours to see if it gets better on its own.

It’s easy as a doctor to see when you aren’t needed. Not so easy as a patient!

No I think the Tories have a lot to answer for. Their chronic underfunding of the NHS including effectively pay cuts for nhs staff staff over the last 15 years has led to this.

do I think Labour should have built more hospitals and trained up more doctors and nurses in the last 6 months or so? Well that would have been lovely but also slightly unrealistic. I believe it takes longer than six months to train staff. No point building more hospitals or extending them if you don’t have staff for them. Though I also understand that thanks to the tories having fucked the economy up over the last decade there also isn’t the money to do this anyway. There is no magic money tree.

It comes down to political pressure and given people are quick to say they’re fine and 50 hour waits is not on them, I agree they probably feel those deaths will be tolerated atm

Axing the free flu jabs for 50 to 64 year olds can't have helped.

My ds didn't get his flu spray at school until December which seems very late.

How do you think they are responsible and what do you think they should have done in 5 months to fix it all?

It'll be interesting to see the age profile of patients relative to previous years. We know that age UK have been concerned about the health consequences resulting from the decimation of the winter fuel allowance. The NHS was always going to pick up the tab for that.

Ah yes the poster that blames everything on Labour and never holds her party to account on anything at all.... all brilliant over their 14 years in office.

350 to 500 additional deaths per week happened in 2023/24 due to incorrect care in AE and subsequent poor treatment, this according to the College of Emergency Medicine

I have been a Nurse for 30 years now so have a lot of experience. It has to start with the social care system, if we cannot get patients out of hospital we do not have capacity to admit them. Social care is woefully underfunded and in an aging population it has put immense pressure on services. The pay and conditions are crap and carers can earn more working in a supermarket so why would they choose to work in care?

People need to take some responsibility for their own health too, the NHS is not a magic wand, we do not have magic pills it is up to you to a certain extent to do the best you can to look after yourself too. Of course it should be there when you need it but the amount of folks that lead seriously unhealthy lifestyles or don't comply with treatment is shocking.

Primary care needs to do better, if people cannot get a GP appointment they will call 111/999 and so this clogs up services. GP surgeries need to working 7 days a week, of course GPs would revolt against this but it is true, people are not only sick Monday - Friday, yes there are out of hours services but they only have limited capacity.

The NHS spends billions on agency staff and paying fat cat agency bosses, if they spent those billions on giving staff on the ground a really decent wage to make it an attractive role recruitment and retention would be so much better.

They are the first things that spring to mind, we could do so much better even without investing more money but we don't and so the cycle continues.

It's flu season. The wards will be full of the elderly just as they were 2 years ago (the last bad flu season).

That's interesting (and good!) but clearly unusual. We've had warnings for several weeks about how noone should go unless they're seriously nearly dead as it's so hideously busy.

Ah yes you

No pressure as pp said

Freezing rn too

A and E is like the tip of ice berg. It’s the visual, easily measurably but it’s just the baramometer of the rest of the NHS. Unless there was an external major incident if the rest of the NHS was working well so would A and E.

It's a social care problem, not an A&E problem. Overwhelmingly patients are elderly, some 85%. 20% of beds in wards are taken up with medically fit elderly patients who cannot be discharged. Others can't get GP appointments, so tip up at A&E.

The issues start at community level, not hospital level. And this issue has been kicked down the road for decades.