Surprised by not being able to get ambulance

[FrenchFancie]

This is in no way to have a dig at the ambulance service or at the hospitals (but maybe slightly at the junior doctors strike) but I have been really surprised recently when, for the first time in aaages, I have had to call 999 twice, and on both occasions wasn’t able to get an ambulance.

firstly my daughter was having an asthma attack, and not responding to medication. After 10 reliever puffs we called, and were told it would be a 1-2 hour wait. So we stuffed her in the back of the car and drove like idiots to the local hospital instead, where she was seen straight away. But it was a scary midnight drive. Her asthma plan states to ring 999 after 10 puffs and the ambulance should attend within 10 minutes.

second was through work where a child was having an epileptic seizure and again, we were told it was an unknown wait time, possibly 1-2 hours.

both of these things I felt really scared about, wanting urgent professional help and support, but it wasn’t available. I know I’m not going to get an ambulance for an adult with broken ankle, but kids with quick onset, possibly life threatening conditions, I was shocked there was nothing available.

is this the same now everywhere? It’s been years since I had to call 999 (like 10 years) and got a quick response last time (daughter fell off changing table, was in London and overreacted to her banging her head but the crew were lovely).

I don’t blame the ambulance service or 999 operators - in fact on both occasions the operator sounded stressed and upset they couldn’t get me help.

what, if anything, can be done about this situation?

I waited 10 hours recently after calling regarding a very serious incident, then waited hours in a&e, spent days in a corridor, it's truly awful.

And also a lack of out of hours doctors appointment. I remember being a child poorly with some kind of respiratory illness that warranted an out of hours trip to the doctor. They no longer offer this so it’s either wait and see or A&E (unless it’s an injury in which case there is still a minor injuries unit local)

This was how it was explained to me as well during a 5 hour stay in ambulance fairly recently. There’s not room on the wards to shift people from A&E to a ward, and subsequently those people have to stay in A&E so there’s no room for new patients coming in

5 minutes? I'm at least 25 minutes away from any ambulance station. Our local hospital stopped emergency surgery. So if there's a road traffic accident, patients have to be taken an hour away. I've had life threatening situations where I've had to ring and I was priority and it still took 45 minutes.

With those conditions I wouldn't bother with an ambulance. If I had a car I'd set off straight away. Even if ambulances were plentiful, I'd still use the car.

I've lived across the road from our local a&e for 50 years & there are frequently as many as 7 ambulances waiting outside. This is a relatively small hospital built in the 70s - they never envisaged having more than 2 vehicles parked outside so the current situation can be chaotic. This never used to be like this & has definitely got worse in the last decade.

10 hour wait for my elderly stepdad with a broken hip.
The next time he needed one I drove him in and he spent 5 days in casualty.
I recently heard of someone local waiting 5 hours with a heart attack.
It is scary how long they are taking.

Reading some of thse stories, is it not time to call in the army. Set up field hospitals, staffed by retired medics, etc. If we can house illegal immigrants in hotels, surely.the state could repurpose mandatorily some hotels as convalescent, nursing home facilities? Perhaps some of the junior doctors without training contracts could be utilised?

I totally respect that but it must be even worse at the moment. You had an absolutely awful experience, I hope you have had a good recovery.

It is not the fault of social services either. Social care is underfunded and under resourced. Appropriate care needs to found to prevent further injuries and hospitalisations but there simply aren't the placements or care staff.

Going back a while now, over 10 years ago, i called for an ambulance for my 16 year old daughter who had had an epileptic seizure and smacked her head on a table as she fell - we found her in a pool of blood.

I was assured the ambulance was on its way and i was told not to move her and to stand outside to greet the crew. We live 5 minutes from the local hospital and for the next two hours, I kept seeing/hearing ambulances which just kept going past us.

My daughter had semi recovered by this point and wanted to go to the toilet, but we had been told not to move her. I even called back and asked if we should just put her in the car and bring her to A&E but was told no, we couldn't move her.

About three hours after the incident, a volunteer paramedic turned up in his car! I think he was St Jonn's Ambulance. He checked her over- then called for an ambulance, which then did turn up.

I wrote to my MP about it and he contacted the ambulance service and I got a very detailed response, with lots of data about the cslls versus ambulances available that evening.

Basically they kept dispatching an ambulance to us but then had to divert them every time because more urgent calls came through.

My understanding is that if you are not breathing, you are Cat A and they obviously take precedence over everything. We were cat B but they had so many Cat As.

It can really vary too according to where you live. My parents live in rural Scotland. My daughter had her first seizure there and the ambulance arrived in minutes because there is one on stand by in the local town specifically because it's so far from the hospital and public transport is practically non existent. I live in London and there is potentially more access to ambulances and hospitals but with huge demand.

I’d question that problem of the ‘public outcry’. We need one. There are plenty of threads on here attracting loads of posts. Do all these people copy the posts to their MPs? Have they ever tried involving local media?

We do have a major and growing problem and it needs addressing. I agree with the op who mentioned 14 years of austerity and the need to value health staff, starting with rewarding their work and not charging them to train. So many of the boomers who are the largest health care users do not seem to know that the student nurse helping them is having to PAY to work. Npt to mention the current lack of jobs at the end for them. Bloody ludicrous.

@WaryCrow I see you are usimg the term "boomer" pejoratively. I imagine you mean people like DH and I who are 65 and 64, and who between us have 90 years of NI contributions and are still working. The removal of bursaries was not our decision but I beloeve it happened because so many were doing a nursing degree and then immediately leaving nursing once they had it. I fully support the return of the bursary providing it comes with a seven year commitment to work for the NHS but the nursing unions do not suppprt that.

Yes, I do wrote to my MP. The situation has been mismanaged for decades and whilst thinhs were better for staff thirty years ago, they were not propprtionately better. My ds was born on 25.12.94. There were more midwives than patients. Did that extrapolate to help and support and pain relief. No.

Do people on here really still not understand , even after the PPE scandal & the placement of people with Covid into care homes during the pandemic that largely politicians don’t work for us and aren’t remotely interested in fixing the NHS ?
Look at how many people governing us have shares in private health companies . Look at the detail of the 2012 H&S care act . Look at the scandal of our blood plasma , given freely by donors being SOLD under the Cameron government to an American company , Bain Capitol , so that the NHS have to buy it back to use . Look at how hospital land has been sold off . Look how many hospital beds have been cut since 1980 , despite population growth .
It isn’t the fault of doctors , nurses , Boomers or immigrants . . The plan has long been to siphon off our money into the pockets of private corporations and let the system fail , prior to privatisation at the point of delivery.
I’ve been trying to tell people since the 1980s ( when I marched to try and save NHS dentistry). In those days wed pretty much eradicated dental decay in children under 10 .
Now decayed teeth ( with all the misery that causes children ) is the leading cause of a child requiring a GA . How much money does that waste alone ?

I think the issues are as much aboit the NHS being treated like a sacred cow by the publoc for generations and rhe underpinning gratitude for a service that has never, ever been free. In the 90s I could get my DC regisyered with an NHS dentist, but they were not providing the standards I required for my DC. Ditto ENT, ditto asthma support, ditto orthopaedic services - all of which were suboptimal. After a botched birth in 1994, the NHS offered zippo in relation to my prolapsed bladder.

👏🏿 👏🏿 👏🏿

I just think the British are too nice and understanding sometimes.It’s absolutely not the staff’s fault and they are usually lovely and no one likes to complain or kick up a fuss. So it’s the NHS is wonderful ( yes as a concept it is and the staff are very skilled) and we are very grateful for it, but it actually needs an urgent overhaul. Other similar countries do better ( not perfect either but better)

@WaryCrow I imagine your experiences explain why when I was in A&E it was clearly assumed I was pig thick, afforded no respect and spoken to like a piece of Sh1t. You bet my MP got involved.

Happy to start an outcry. As I'm entering into semi-retirement I've joined the patient experience panel at my local trust and am going to stand as a local councillor.

Notwithstanding that, it is rude to use a term pejoratively and to make generalisations. Your professional training should have taught you that. Boomer refers to the part of the population aged between 62 and 80. To make negative comments is ageist and I'd have thought the NHS EDI Directors would have cascaded that, bearing in mind how invested in equality the NHS is.

I think the British are far , far too lax at following politics .
It’s difficult as the mainstream news papers are often very poor at reporting on what is actually happening .
The NHS isn’t getting an overhaul . It has been deliberately carved up and privatised whilst the quality of service run down . Shareholders are the only winners
The next step being that we will have to pay at the point of receiving care & will have an American style healthcare system .

What a nonsensical, deeply unpleasant diatribe .
You are looking through the eyes of prejudice. People vary hugely across all generations, as they always have and always will .

GP services have always been private businesses - not the choice of politicians but demanded by the GP lobby as the price of cooperation with any form of “nationalised’ health care.

Private health care was housed in public hospitals at the demand of the consultants' lobby. Bevan “stuffed their mouths with gold” - the price doctors demanded to stop blocking public healthcare.

Many senior staff making spending and policy decisions are clinical or former clinical staff. Its simply not true that NHS staff over the past 70 years have had no say in management, spending and priorities and procurement. Doctors lobbies have driven a huge amount of the decision making by politicians - everyone used to love doctors, everyone can be persuaded of the bad faith of politicians. There has never been a shortage of doctors wanting to play at politics - just look at the state of the “science optional" BMA currently.
And yes there have been plenty of lousy decisions by politicians and some fantastically stupid structural changes but its not true that the medical lobbies had had no influence. Don’t forget also that for most of the life of the NHS, doctors as a group have voted right, not left.

Mostly though, politicians did not dictate a culture which treats patients as supplicants rather than the reason for the NHS existence.
Politicians did not dictate the retention of antiquated business processes which make patients’ lives so much more difficult and could only ever survive in a monopoly system. One of the biggest problems for the NHS is the culture of we must be “grateful” however bad it is, or that its “free” and that a complaint is some kind of nasty attack on the holy NHS.

There is no reward or bonus beyond job satisfaction for the staff doing an exceptional job, there is no penalty for those who do the bare minimum or treat patients poorly. That is fundamentally wrong.

Across Europe state backed insurance models result in private companies provide good healthcare, often very significantly better and more timely than is available under the NHS. Its not an accident that countries moving to state backed healthcare in the post war period looked at the UK and thought “no thanks”.

And it appears that you have zero cognizance about the damage that is done by making sweeping generalisations. Use your words for any other characteristic covered by the Equality Act and you would be banned from this site.

Do you not appreciate that my generation
has children who are gen x? One of mine has relocated to South Africa for a career opportunity no longer available in the UK, post PhD, post Post Doc and post an increasingly insecure permanent role.

I can imagine just how rude you are to my generation within your role in the NHS. I hope very much to meet you one day.

I have never called an ambulance but my elderly (late 80s) neighbour called one a couple of days ago when a varicose vein burst. They apparently arrived within 15 minutes which I was very encouraged by.

It was early morning, so perhaps not a busy time of day.