A&E experience 8 hours wait

[marshmallowmix]

Not been to A&E in a very long time....I am gobsmacked at what I saw. Liked we were into a war zone....

We waited 8 hours and gave up and went home at 5am as we had had no sleep and couldn't handle the wait time, we were sent after we saw the out of hours doctor at the hospital.

No update, so many people everywhere, place was not clean and had being patrolled by two security guards that looked like they had come form the Russian army...

Not a nice place to wait, so many people like it is madness....people sleeping on seats when did it get this bad.

We keep building little box flats near me 5 new developments which will add thousands to the area but the one hospital on its knees as is every other service but we keep building and no new hospitals/dentists/doctors/schools...

I despair at the utter state of the country... I knew it was bad but what I saw last night was horrific and eye opening....we are in serious decline much worse than I thought...the A&E visit just brought it all in to sharp focus...

I've since looked up the reviews of my A&E and they are terrible really terrible...it is very frightening to think when you are ill and vulnerable the standard of care and what is out there...🙁

But what can we do to make things better? I asked op and they said they don’t know. Do you have any suggestions?
Here’s a couple:
Implement real triage with someone actually medical in the waiting room
Get the best people working in Emergency medicine and not the worst.
Make senior managers /ED board members actually visit ED s. One doctor ( hours and hours later when we finally accessed the inner sanctum) told me she’d never seen a manager in the department..
Sort out GP appointments and stop sending the wrong people to Emergency
Make sure people in pain have pain relief as a priority
Stop treating every patient who walks in with contempt and suspicion.
That’s for starters.

You would do better to copy this in an email to your MP and demand action.

Yes it’s shit. And other European countries have far better.

It always makes me laugh when people say "You can wait in A&E for 8 hours. You chose to leave. You didn't need to be there". Who in their right mind would sit in a horrible uncomfortable waiting room for 8 hours if they didn't have to?

I think a move to part-payments/insurance has to at least be considered. Affluent people will be incentivised to switch entirely to private care, the rest of us will be incentivised to turn up to appointments and only seek medical care when we really need it. Obviously you’d have to have a cut-off point so that kids and people on genuinely low incomes don’t have to pay.

we have to sort out social care - as I understand it half the resources in the NHS are going to safeguarding/babysitting elderly people for whom there is no affordable council/private non-hospital care. This will cost billions and billions and will have to be paid for by tax rises.

and we have to massively ramp up GP services and primary care so that fewer people are driven to A&E. This will also cost billions and billions and will also have to be paid for by tax rises.

Hollow laugh at all the posts on here saying ‘should just talk to your GP instead’ . When I had my gallbladder out (privately - the NHS would have left me waiting in pain for around two years) the post-op monitoring picked up brachycardia and arrhythmia. The GP appointment for this is in three weeks’ time, so nearly TEN weeks after it was picked up. This is standard at my surgery when begging for a GP appointment (service available between 8am and 8.03am Monday to Friday).

Honestly, I get the frustrations of NHS staff and believe me I blame the Tories, but telling people to be grateful for this shit isn’t going to fly.

This.

Why pay £50k for studying healthcare, which involves paying to work on the wards, to work in shit conditions for low pay serving millionaire footballers and landlords? It’s even worse now: some are doing that work only to be told there are no jobs because the government import fully trained and experienced staff from abroad instead.

We spent 6.5 hours in A &E as Dd had fractured her wrist. It didn’t even seem that busy. There was issue clearing the consulting spaces so it took hours to go through. Once we were there it was fast examination, X-ray, splint , appointment at next virtual fracture clinic.

We don’t have a minor injuries so have to go to A &E, they normally stream people so they can get the minor injuries dealt with by nurse practitioners and back out the door.

We had to call an ambulance for mum just before christmas

We are grateful there was a paramedic with us within 30 mins

We are grateful that an ambulance was diverted to us within an hour

We are grateful that she only had an hours wait in the ambulance bay before being transferred to a trolley in a corridor ( because her BP dropped so low )

We are grateful that the ENT came to see her within 5 hours

We are grateful that the team were able to perform the wee op needed so that she could be discharged back to the waiting list - in that corridor with no privacy

We are grateful to have been seen and treated and home again within 12 hours

The 21st century , in the UK, and we are grateful for that level of service.

DH has just had to go on the sick, first time he has even seen a sick note ( aged 63 ) because he can no longer physically work, as he's waited 5 years so far for an operation on his hands - his fingers are curled, cant be opened, dupuytrens contractures. Even washing or shaving is becoming impossible for him

I think your opening post is slightly misleading as he didn’t wait 8hrs and nothing happened, he was assessed and a CT scan was organised out of hours and done but you chose not to wait for the results? I presume they have contacted you to return if there was anything concerning on the scan?

Its not just an A&E issue it’s health and social care as a whole; the hospitals are full because patients can’t be discharged due to lack of care availability which means patients are waiting days for a bed on a ward. Then A&E is full with people who don’t actually need to be there, often sent by out of hours GPs or 111 who don’t know what to do so just default to there.

The entire system is broken and I don’t know how it will be fixed, an ever growing population, an aging population, tax cuts, nurses and doctors leaving the profession by the truckload it’s pretty scary.

GP surgeries need to bear a lot of responsibility for this. A lot only do same day appointments now, but expect you to call them at 7 on the day, when you can be joining a queue of dozens of other callers, only to be turned away when the daily list is full. So people are now starting to use A&E as an extension of GP surgeries because they’re desperate. Plus an ever increasing population which is causing our infrastructure to collapse before our eyes.

This ! Why are people trotting out all the usual excuses for a shit NHS ! People obviously have a very low bar for decent care nowadays.
I worked in AE back in the 90s in Brighton and it was very unusual for there to be any patients waiting in minor injuries after 1am . All patients were transferred to wards within 4 hours that needed admission.

Who in their right mind would sit in a horrible uncomfortable waiting room for 8 hours if they didn't have to?

Apparently, all the ‘frequent flyers’ and their extended families who arrive weekly, order pizza then check-in on FB for the “U okay Huns” 🙄

I went recently it was ‘urgent’ as I had the symptoms of a condition that requires a fast response. I was inthe priority area and still waited 2 hours to be seen and 5 hours for a mri. When I was admitted after about 11 hours the doctor was horrified I hadn’t received pain meds as I was in agony.

Badhunny · Today 16:03
You were there 8 hours, imagine working there.…
Ps [wont let me edit] we work for 12 hours at a stretch, with two half hour breaks. That’s it.

You do realise they can’t force you to sign a form ?

I wouldn’t be signing one.

These people making excuses are part of the problem.

Suggestinf we are lucky we have to put up with this shit because it’s “free”. No it isn’t and it’s utterly unacceptable.

I agree with the PP who said we need a system like the French but no one had the balls to do it.

But doctors don’t wait until the end of their shift to do discharges though, if you don’t work in the NHS or healthcare you really have no idea what the process is, so commenting what you think they should do isn’t really a fair comment when you don’t have all the facts. Pharmacists have thousands of medication prescriptions to fill everyday, hence the waiting around for it. A lot of people are involved in discharging a patient it’s not just one person but a whole team of different occupations and roles that need to sort it out. Sometimes it’s fairly straight forward but other times it’s more complex. A doctor discharging a patient asap from a gastro ward isn’t going to free up a bed for a patient that has cardiac problems in A&E. They’ll be waiting on a bed in a cardiac ward.

That’s atrocious. Thank you for sharing this story. If this is what it has come to (‘go home and die at your own risk, and it’ll be on you’) then that’s terrifying.

When they did examine him they realised he could have died. Leaving him for 16 hours was not OK.

But you signed up for the career knowing that??

A friend of mine went to A&E recently on her GP's insistence. She waited more than 24 hours, in the common waiting area, vomiting & diarrhoea, no privacy, no shower, no medicine, no infection control. When eventually tested, she had sepsis as well as e.coli. Very easily could have died. And, also, since she was able to walk to the toilets to throw up, could also, in theory, have left A&E instead. In which case, she would have died. And my grandfather went to A&E recently, again on GP advice, with an infection. Already diagnosed with terminal cancer. He waited, again in communal waiting area, on a Saturday nights surrounded by people there because of drugs OD/ alcohol related injuries, for 16 hours, then another 8 on a trolley, close to death - no treatment, no privacy. He died on the ward not long after that. People saying, if you left you didn't need to be there, and 'surely', if you're sick enough, you'd have been seen more quickly - you're in for a rude awakening if you need A&E at a bad time. People are dying waiting to be seen in A&E in this country, and having seen it nearly happen to my grandfather - the loss of dignity and privacy, and the helplessness of the staff - it's harrowing. I know what war zones look like, and a bad night at A&E isn't worlds away.

The thing is, when I challenged the form and pointed out that the 12 or so people that had walked out earlier didn't get asked to sign a form, he said that they would have their AMA written in their notes. But none of them were told that by following his suggestion they were leaving Against Medical Advice, and in fact, if a doctor tells you to consider leaving, that will be seen as medical advice.

Well it's a vicious circle now. Conditions are so shit the staff are burnt out /leaving /not joining in the first place. So then poor staffing adds to the shit conditions and so it goes on....

I do believe some Trusts are worse than others, some CEOs are crap, senior managers can be very out of touch with how clinical services actually work.

But bottom line is austerity was the death knell for our NHS.

So because he didn't die you think he shouldn't have been there?

You need a shovel for your bar it appears to have sunk

Different trusts work differently ours do discharge paperwork around 6pm. Also in our trust you just get a bed its one in and one out their are no spare beds you have to wait for someone to be discharged or die iv been on the over 75s ward im in my 20s , cardiac instead of neurology, vascular instead of cardiology. Then the drs come see you on the ward your on until their is a bed to move you over.

DH had to go in last week, he suffers from atrial fibrilation and at 4am, he was woken by his Apple watch telling him he was in AF. Heartbeat was 165bpm. 111 advised an ambulance but I drove him in as we're rural and he was triaged immediately. But as his ECG was fine, and he had no chest pain - they advised a referral to same day emergency care which opens at 10am. They said the A & E wait was around 14 hours.... so it was a no brainer. In fairness, he had bloods, ECG, and chest x ray - and given medication to slow heart down which it did. Discharged after 6 hours in, and referred to GP/cardiology.