Oldsu and Avocado that’s appalling.
Please, please make sure that things like this are always going through PALS as a complaint. They’re generally very good at sorting things out.
Stories like this are used to push a narrative that people are feckless wasters who could have a GP appointment but rock up to A&E instead. The number of people like this are vanishingly rare. In reality most people who access A&E inappropriately do so because they don’t know what else to do, can’t access an alternative and think they’re doing the right thing.
Also, the people who think that when illness occurs an imaginary buzzer starts flashing for EMERGENCY or NON-EMERGENCY. It can be incredibly hard to tell whether a GP is needed or an ambulance in many situations, and the hand wringing about abuse of A&E prevents some people from going when they should, as we see from posts here all the time. In reality, symptoms often don’t exactly match a list of red flags on the NHS website or the language used is too vague. When my boys were tiny, one contracted whooping cough. The NHS info said to seek urgent medical attention if your child is “struggling to breathe” but doesn’t explain what that looks like - I had no idea that his nostrils flaring and skin pulling in around his ribs were signs of struggling to breathe, I knew nothing about babies and I’ve never seen those things in an older person struggling to breathe.
We called an ambulance because he was suddenly floppy and unresponsive - until then we thought he had a cold. They told us he had bronchiolitis and it wasn’t bad enough to admit him yet so take him home and wait until it got worse. Except he already had all the symptoms they were telling me to look for.
We had five days of watching him round the clock, it stayed the same, it didn’t get worse or better. We took him back twice in those five days and they said don’t worry, it will pass. Took him for a NICU check up and his o2 level had dropped to 70%. They had to call an ambulance just to drive him across the road to A&E he was so sick, they wouldn’t even let me take him in the buggy. We spent 11 traumatic nights in HDU on high flow oxygen.
And the rib recessions? Enlarged adenoids. Nothing to do with the whooping cough because they didn’t go away until he was a year old. Every time he had a cold I was petrified because I didn’t know what signs to look for.
It’s sometimes hard with adults to know whether something is very serious or not, let alone children who can’t talk to you.