AIBU to think everyone has an NHS horror story?

[corygal]

Because I have, and he died. Went from ok to dead in 3 days. Violently. In hospital. The details are so simple, and so distinctive, that I can't out them on yer interweb. But at the inquest the doctors lied. Then lied again in court, as it happens, so no one can talk about it even 5 yrs on as it's still doing the court rounds.

So what has happened to you and the people you know? I'm posting because the expression 'everyone makes mistakes, even dedicated NHS staff' on a current thread has made my teeth itch.

YABU

No one in my large extended family spanning four generations has an NHS horror story. It saved the life of my grandson.

Just for the record.

how dreadful for you
NHS can get it wrong with harrowing results
it also gets it right and saves life's

I have a mixed bag of nhs experiences. The bad ones are not disastrous, just small niggling issues that nonetheless impacted on the patient and our family. things that are rightly and fairly attributed to funding issues and understaffing. The odd unfairly rude member of staff.

I do believe that mistakes do and will happen in the nhs, and that it's not a sign if the service being rotten at the core. The same mistakes can and do occur in every healthcare setting around the world. Likewise, they are sometimes badly handled. I say this not to undermine your feelings of anger and grief, OP, I don't think the notion is intended to patronise but sadly it sometimes comes over that way.

Sometimes the NHS is tremendous. When my daughter was delivered at 36 weeks due to foetal distress, my treatment was exemplary. When she started convulsing in NICU they wasted no time in running the diagnostic checks that confirmed their suspicions that she had suffered a massive brain haemorrhage. She had multiple MRI tests, EEGs, countless blood tests, a* treatment. Our post discharge follow up was amazing, we had regular home visits from a NICU sister. We were invited to family support groups funded by the NHS. We were seem regularly by a neonatologist until she was two. We ate now seen regularly by a community paediatrician that us caring, involved, and invested in our family. We have been offered regular, highly beneficial blocks of speech therapy, occupational therapy, physio and specialist integrated therapy for children with cerebral palsy. We have been loaned special equipment that has been massively helpful. We have had a wheelchair supplied to help us manage longer distances. Our therapy provision has been via a multidiscipliniary children's centre, meaning our therapists work collaboratively to maximise results. We've had surgery funded via a different nhs trust so she could have treatment from a specialist. We've had treatment, in short, that we could never have afforded to pay for ourselves, even with insurance, in another country. There have been niggles, sure, nothing I couldn't solve with a few annoyed phone calls. But it has been amazing, and as a result my daughter enjoys abilities we never could have dreamed of when we had the results of that first brain scan six years ago. They saved her life and made it fabulous, the nhs have given me my incredible daughter. I am forever in their debt.

I was about to say I don't have a horror story.

Then I remembered.

I lay in bed at home, unable to move, in agony if the sheet so much as brushed my stomach, with sickness and diarrhoea which smelt like death, and a temperature of 41.5 for three days while DH called out three separate doctors who all diagnosed food poisoning because despite the temperature I was lucid and could hold a conversation.

The last time he got someone out it was a paramedic who took one look at me, called it in and had me bluelighted to hospital.

I lay there for fourteen more hours while they did blood tests etc and scratched heads in the medical ward. Eventually they called for a surgical consult. She took one look and called a consultant. The consultant tore strips off the medical staff in front of me and had me transferred immediately. They did a scan, saw fluid and thought it was my appendix so scheduled me for surgery.

The professor came round, took one look and said, she's not making it to that scheduled slot, get her downstairs now.

All of this I remember, I was lucid, I was talking, I couldn't get out bed and was in agony but by now had morphine at least.

I had blood borne pneumonia which had caused peritonitis and septicemia, my lung collapsed during surgery, I woke up in high dependency with oxygen, an arterial line, a main line into my neck, you name it.

So yes some poor judgements, particularly by the gps, but also some spot on treatment which is the only reason I'm still here today.

I love the NHS. I now live in North America. Believe me when I say you only know how good you have it when it's gone. My DH's uncle who was a millionaire and then some, died broke because he got cancer. Despite good insurance and lots of spare cash he ended his days with his brother having to drop a cheque for $10,000 on his bed so that he could pay for his care.

Please protect the NHS, you don't want the alternative.

Mixed experiences and more good than bad like most people, but unfortunately the bad experience resulted in the death of a relative following a serious mis-diagnosis. By the time it was established she had malignant myeloma (not arthritis, because they're the same ) she was too weak to withstand chemo and died shortly after the correct diagnosis was made.

I don't. Without our NHS my family would be much smaller. My dad had a heart attack, my mum is a diabetic, both of my children were prem, my elderly grandparents have had exemplary treatment for various things.

Our NHS isn't perfect, I could whittle on about the things it has done badly but i'd rather concentrate on the things it has done well.

I am so sorry for those of you who have suffered from incompetence. Thankfully our family have had nothing but positive experiences from the NHS. Without them DD would have died.

"I just wish that treatment was of a consistently high standard for everybody who needs it."

I agree. It is such a lottery.

I'm so sorry for your loss, OP.

I think this is one of those topics where if it hasn't happened to you, you would not understand what the fuss was about....until one day it does.

Two years ago I did not have a bad word to say about the NHS and was baffled by all the complainig I used to hear about it.

Now I too have a similar, terrible story.

For me it isn't the medical mistakes that were made that bother me so much as the covering up and the lying, which sounds like it might be true for you too.

If we had been able to have an honest conversation about what happened, rather than constant obfuscation it would have made my loss much, much easier to bear.

I used to be really susupicious of people taking about cover-ups, and think it sounded so unlikely to be the case. Yet my experience now is that a group of people who were supposed to be caring for me and my baby have lied comprehensively about what they did and did not do, and try and paint me as a trouble maker, hysteric or so grief-striken i don't know reality from fantasy. It is deeply shocking to me and has changed my views about a lot of different things.

In my opinion a lot of the problem is down to regulation and supervision. Any culture of lying/dishonesty should be stamped out by those supervising it.

The hosptial where my baby was delivered dead has been consistently judged 'failing' and to be 'putting patients lives at risk' by the regulator for several years now and it still hasn't been closed. This is the problem.

I've not got any.horror stories and my family have used the nhs a lot.

I've had more bad experiences than good; for me it was during my labour. I've also had an awful time trying to have my son assessed for asd - one gp said he didn't have it because he was playing with a toy in the corner of the room

My partner had to wait just over 2 years to have his dd dx with a serious (and obvious) disability - at 3 she couldnt walk, talk, sit up, hold anything and would scream for hours at a time and another gp dx it as bad wind .

Like most people, mixed experience.

My mum died after three GPs diagnosed a twisted bowel due to bowel cancer as 'food poisoning'. However, one of the Gps was so traumatised he had a breakdown soon after.
The quick diagnosis and operating on my dad' s faulty heart valve gave me 9 extra years with him- priceless.
And I have had four operations in the last 18 months and numerous hospital appointments and Gps appts due to my rare and incurable auto immune condition. If I had to pay for healthcare, I would be dead by now- there is no way I could get insurance.

Not the NHS, but the midwife at DS's birth failed to monitor his heartbeat even though we were a high risk case. It wasn't till he was born that they realised his heart had stopped. If they had realised earlier they could have done an emergency section - they had insisted on putting an epidural in earlier just in case, so it wouldn't have taken long - and we wouldn't have to wait 5 years now to find out what damage may have been done to his brain.

When we met with some of the hospital staff afterwards to discuss it, my obstetrician's contribution was 'well, we're only human'. And we were told they were re-training the midwives to make sure to monitor properly - 'because we wouldn't want any of our staff to have to go through that again'.

My blood boils thinking about it.

Following on from my post, and that of SomeOne above, I have just read a very similar story in the mail where a coroner has decided that another trust had deliberately concealed the truth story here

Excellent for all those people who have positive experiences of the NHS. My experience however was slightly different, my Daddy had full on acute Leukaemia, was seeing a consultant practically
Once a week and what was he being prescribed? Vitamins! Fucking vitamins!
Consultant was waiting for it to turn acute apparently but didn't bother testing to see if it had. Took us to go to Kings COllege London where they did the test before she started to bang the chemo tablets in to him at a rate of eight a day! Too late, he died a few days later!
Have lost all trust and faith in doctors/NHS/ people in general.

Am so angry

Have good and bad. My brother had cancer and his level of care was amazing.

My gran was sick for months and no-one did anything. I was a teenager and didn't realise how sick she was and that someone should have been fighting her corner and insisting on treatment. They did NOTHING, just let her die. She was young and had been healthy her whole life.

My mental health problems have been treated like nothing more than an inconvenience to the doctors and something I just have to learn to live with. Not impressed and have given up and got private treatment.

I do.

Birth of my first child. Shoulder dystocia. The doctor panicked and pulled on his head and screamed and as a result of her pulling his head and leaving him stuck there so long, she caused him to need to be resuscitated and to have severe and permanent nerve damage that left him with erbs palsy.

I also have how my grandfather went blind because his GP sat on his test results for 6 months and by the time they acted, the damage was irreversible.

Then there's my grandma, who nearly starved to death on a geriatric ward and had to be rescued by the care home!

But I also have stories of amazing care. When my son had his operations on his arm, the staff were fabulous. Caring, supportive and really took time with us and understood how a parent feels when their child has to have a GA

And the operation I had, where they were so attentive and cheery and I really felt in charge of what was happening to me.

And my GPs surgery which is probably the best in the country! From doctors who will drop everything to let you sit in their surgery sobbing your heart out, to receptionists who will bend the rules for you or who will always find you an appointment if you need one and who always remember your name and your children's name and chat with you while you're waiting, to the nurses who will see one child for a jab and fit the other one in just cos you're there and you asked

So it can be bad. Very very bad. Criminally bad in some cases! And it can be amazing.

It is the lies and the dismissals that get me, too. And the fact that people constantly say that you want to destroy the entire NHS when you want to improve it. I think there are great things about the NHS, but I also think it is institutionally incapable of learning from or admitting failure.

Other stuff: it has no strategy for diagnosing and treating rare diseases (when you think that although they are individually very rare, 1 in 17 people has a rare disease). Similarly, it has no national strategy or pathway for undiagnosed but obvious problems, and a significant number of people will go 10 years or more between onset and diagnosis so it would make sense to work something out for those people.

God, so many things. So many organisational things, like doing some proper oversight on how equipment is allocated out in the community and analysis according to injury/disability rates in the population. Simply comparing those two figures would give a clue to what E&A services are failing.

The only reasonable conclusion is that they don't want to solve these problems. It's done on purpose. I think the NHS tries to finish off my DP because he's expensive and incurable, so there's no "win" for them. The madness we encounteryou can't have a pressure relieving mattress because they're to prevent pressure sores and you've already got a pressure sorecan only be properly explained by this conclusion, imo.

Oh yes, but the closing ranks and, in my case, out and out LYING and falsifying records to try to cover their arses is a big problem.

Also, I worked in a special school last year and we had many student pediatric nurses do a placement with us. The range of ability was truly staggering. Some of them were amazing but some were shallow, lazy, feckless and dangerously stupid/unobservant.

The class I worked in was a PMLD class so the students are severely developmentally delayed. After a week our nurse was assigned her student for the morning (with the group of course, not on her own) and she didn't notice the girl pick up a pair of scissors, cut her finger and bleed all over her white school shirt whilst sitting right next to her. When someone else noticed and we rushed her off the nurse hardly reacted. Didn't apologise, come to help, didn't even look ashamed or embarrased. If she passes heaven help those who meet her in hospital.

Sorry to hear about your story OP but why on earth would you thing that everybody has a horror story? That's a really inflammatory thing to say and clearly you are angry and upset by this, but it doesn't follow that if every single person had a horror story it would still be functioning as it doesn.

I have had a fantastic experience with the NHS this week wrt my son and his condition and every member of staff who I saw over the course of the time he was being treated went above and beyond and really cared about the outcome.

I thank my lucky stars for the NHS to be honest!

meant to say does

I have some nasty NHS stories - mostly around failure to diagnose, medications, cleanliness and their inability to communicate effectively with patients or other HCPs.

However they have saved my life on more than one occasion and I have met some wonderfully caring individuals so overall I thank my lucky stars they were there when I needed them.

The thing is, that whilst the thread refers to the NHS, it's kind of misleading because obviously the NHS is all we've got (if you've got private cover, you still end up NHS in the event of an emergency) but my bet it that many people in other countries, whose hospital system isn't an NHS will also have had bad experiences too.