Stay at home, protect the nhs, save lives

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AIBU to find this slogan annoying especially how it seems to prioritise protecting an organisation. The ‘save lives’ bit seems almost secondary to protecting the NHS. It is also dangerous and probably contributes to people avoiding going for treatment when they should be and thus leading the increase in deaths from other causes.

We shouldn’t be ‘protecting the NHS’ as though it is something sacred. It should be ‘Stay at home, save lives, don’t spread Covid’

The Government likes a nice clear slogan.
Easy to remember.

And anything that challenges it is much longer and more difficult to understand.

Stay safe, save lives.

The slogan was even worse - it was stay home which none of us say. It shoudl be stay at home really. Stay home jars on me.

Anyway it sounds like it is now ditched.

The only thing the slogan wanted no matter how many died at home was to ensure ambulances refused to take you in, you could get through to your GP, 111 took 3 hours to answer and ambulances even if they came out after a 5 hour wait refused to take you in, that hospitals were empty because that is the God, that matters more than anything, that we have 4000 empty covid beds in exel London etc. We can have the worst deaths in London and only take people in when their lips are blue and they can die left right and centre but as long as the NHS is not there for us when we need it and it is fairly empty that is all that matters.

It got taken down as of Saturday didn't it? Or have I made that up?

@Xenia, how on earth did all those poor people who have died in hospital get there ?

The save lives part is save them by making sure we don’t let people die due to lack of medical care, the two are linked. The save lives part isn’t save people by stopping them catching it, eventually people will come out, catch it, be it this year, next, whenever, so holding people indoors to ‘save’ them from being infected would be a fruitless exercise long term. We just didn’t want people dead who would have lived had there been a hospital bed.

"But people have died at home due to fear of calling for help"

People have died at home because ambulances have refused to take them to hospital.

I didn't see any paramedics breaking the news to the public that the score used had been put up to a dangerous level.

Nurses have died at home and in the Nurse accommodation after being refused hospital admission and oxygen support.

We've known for a while that this virus hides that we are running out of oxygen. The lungs are still inflating and the patient doesn't feel that anything is wrong. Yet we are using indicators that we know are giving incorrect analysis of the situation.

We are allowing otherwise healthy people under 50 to die and that should be causing outrage.

It looks very sweet when a woman in her 90's gets clapped out of the ward. But we do need answered why in the three weeks that she has been in we've let parents in their 30's die at home.

Ate we picking out 'poster' patients? What Captain Tom did was admiral, but there were other OAPs doing things, before him. They decided to make a feature of him, sod his peers dying in droves in the care homes.

Well there's been beds available throughout - thousands of them - at the same time as us having the second highest number of deaths in the world. So that worked well.

Having had it I can understand why people don’t call for help sooner, you don’t struggle to breath, as in drawing breath is as easy as it was before, you are comfortable. However exert yourself in any way (even a trip to the loo) and the room spins through the lack of oxygen, but you aren’t gasping through blocked airways so it doesn’t feel necessary to call an ambulance. I understand this bit can very quickly deteriorate and you go from feeling ok to organ failure in a matter of hours.

I think this slogan has worked. We all read it and mostly took personal responsibility to do our bit to keep each other safe.

It's more catchy than Don't Get Sick and Turn Hospitals Into Morgues.

Agree that it's nonsense, especially "protect the NHS". The NHS would not be harmed at all by an overwhelming number of patients. They would die or recover, the pandemic would end, and the NHS would carry on.

Are you saying that they have changed the NEWS scoring protacol @Ponoka7 ?

Its not ‘normal’ ill feeling, I was walking around my garden at points, just sitting when I got head rush. It wasn’t can’t lift your head from the pillow stuff, it wasn’t like anything I’ve ever had before. I didn’t have a particularly high temperature but felt warm and very lethargic but I have felt much worse. I could taste the dead cells on my breath and the pain was pretty intense at moments but I wouldn’t have called an ambulance because I kind of felt ok. There are lots of tales of people walking themselves onto the back of ambulances only to be dead within the day, it is unsurprising people are getting taken unawares and dying at home.

Not screening for cervical cancer, or starting cancer treatments etc, because of covid 19, means a system that cannot cope.

Does it or does it mean that it reduces the infection risk by reducing the number of people coming into healthcare settings, and was taken as a precautionary measure.

All I see now when is see that slogan is " stay home, die quietly, save the nhs.

At our local community centre they have made 3 beautiful signs for this slogan, but they have put them up in the window in the wrong order, so that they read “ NHS “
“STAY AT HOME “
“THANK YOU “
It makes me smile whenever I walk past it.
I am eternally grateful the NHS don’t stay at home.
🤣

The NHS is only revered at the moment because of the crisis, which has of course made all NHS workers heroes.

Have we forgotten the Stafford Hospital scandal:
"a catalogue of failings, including receptionists assessing patients arriving at A&E, a shortage of nurses and senior doctors, and pressure on staff to meet targets....with patients left in soiled sheets, others crying out in pain and some so dehydrated they drank from flower vases...the public's trust in the NHS had been "betrayed" and a change of culture was needed to "make sure that patients come first".
And the very recently revealed situation at Shrewsbury and Telford hospitals.
"These findings show not only had there been some very serious failings indeed, uncovered by this review, but the scale of the malpractice and the number of women and babies affected by it exceeded anything that had been expected when the review was initiated." (6-900 babies affected)

She said the concerns had been dismissed and poor care was "normalised".

In both these cases there was neglect and poor practice from nurses and midwives up to higher management. whistleblowers were victimised.
The NHS is like many other organisations, mainly good, partly excellent but nevertheless with a dark underbelly of appaling care and neglect.

It is a dangerous thing to turn a whole sector of society into Heroes. I for one hope that the nurses who neglected my uncle at Stafford hospital, where he died, will not be gleefully claiming their 50% off this that and the other anywhere near me.

Never trust a slogan - remember where "Strong and Stable Government" and "Get Brexit done" got us.

Bowel cancer screening doesnt require any contact with a healthcare setting though - just post a sample to the lab. I Dont know if there’s an infection risk In analysing the sample - not an expert but perhaps that could be mitigated using infection control procedures?

I agree mammography and cervical cancer screening require physical contact - is the answer more ppe again?

frumpety, in London (for poneka's point) they did change the basis under which you would be admitted as too few were being taken in. That has varied regionally - eg one of my local hospitals Northwick Park was full at one stage and Watford had no oxygen. Other parts of the country have not had the same issues and exel has had about 4000 beds empty.

Also you ask why so many died in hospital then - in part because you only got taken in if you were almost too late to save.

Astrabees there are many in the NHS who really feel uncomfortable with the word 'Hero', including myself.

Protect the NHS is dead simple, dont overwhelm it

We don’t have to revere the NHS to want to keep it functioning - possibly the opposite is true. Health staff don’t have to be heroes, but I want them to be able to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

frumpety, yes it was put up on the 10th of March. It's now been lowered again.

Fruitsaladjelly, people might have been unaware, but those in charge wasn't and neither were front line medical staff. We made the decision to allow people to die at home. Other countries were admitting people for early oxygen support and monitoring people at home.

Re the Nightingale, an ICU nurse from a London hospital, who posts on another forum, explained that it was mostly empty because the criteria for admission were very narrow and few patients met them. For example, the Nightingale could only support lung function, but a lot of very ill Covid patients need renal support as well. The Nightingale couldn't provide this. Patients who were well enough to leave ICU went into beds with lower dependency within the existing hospital, so that ICU facilities were on hand should they subsequently deteriorate and need readmission. Doctors were reluctant to discharge to the Nightingale because it didn't have what it needed in the event of relapse.

Around 200 nursing staff were redeployed to the Nightingale, where they treated hardly anyone, leaving ICU and HDU staff in other hospitals struggling to cope.

TL:DR - not used much because it wasn't much use.

I know that is where they came from but the message is wrong. We shouldn’t be protecting the nhs, the nhs should be there to protect/treat people
This really show a complete misunderstanding of the system. People die everyday. The NHS is there to treat people but ultimately will only 'save' a treatable percentage of admissions in normal circumstances.

These is about helping the nhs so that they can go on saving those who would be saved otherwise. It's not about stopping people saying from Covid19 although of course a percentage of admissions will fall in that category too.

What we need is covid admissions to be no different to any other admissions, some of which will survive and others won't.