Child suffering - no doctor's appointments

[cofingalthetime]

So a friend's little boy aged 3 had a cold that hasn't gotten better - he has a chesty cough, and his eyes are very very sore with green gunk - obviously conjunctivitis. She just cannot get a doctor's appointment. Last night she rang 111 and they said they would send an ambulance, but it would take 6 hours so she took him to A&E but after 5 hours, without even seeing a triage nurse, she brought him home again. On the phone to the doc again this morning, and no appointments. I've just seen the little boy - he's totally listless lying on the sofa, his eyes glued together, breathing sounds awful and his cough is terrible. He just needs some antibiotics? She tried the pharmacist but he would only give her a cough medicine. My friend herself sounds terrible, with an awful cough and she looks terrible, I think she has a chest infection. This must be being duplicated across the whole country - I can imagine people ending up in hospital with pneumonia because they couldnt see a doctor. What should she do... I said maybe go to the surgery with the child so they can see how sick he is...?

Well I am sat here in the hospital for my routine appointment and am told it is a 5 hour wait!! referral was done pre covid and had to be chased and re chased, how can they be running 4 hours late for an appointment that was pre scheduled.

beyond a joke . And to the person who said third world system imo it is an insult to third world countries

There are obviously appointments that have over run due to being more complex than expected, or maybe a member of staff is off sick so those there are doing double the work.

Or maybe there's been an emergency come in. Be thankful the emergency isn't you.

Can you go away and come back later?

It’s a routine appt in a part of hospital that doesn’t deal with emergencies!
All around me people have come with books. I am cursing myself for not bringing my headphones. And am very close to walking out if it hadn’t taken 3 years to get this appointment.
I am amazed how people will go to great lengths to defend the NHS. It really needs a big overhaul.

@kittensinthekitchen i am not going to be thankful for waiting for over 4 hours. Will have a 15£ parking ticket too at the end of this to add insult to injury.

I would suggest people saying we have a 'third world' healthcare system have little to no experience of hospitals in the developing world.

That said, a 5 hour+ wait for a scheduled appointment is ludicrous and, at the very least, someone should be managing the situation. The NHS certainly has no shortage of managers. People have children, jobs, myriad other responsibilities that don't allow for a day sat about for something that was booked and it's not unreasonable to be incredibly annoyed by it.

I have experience of them and they were a darn sight better than this. At least you got seen when you needed to, got follow up appointments in a suitable time period and saw doctors who were determined to get to the bottom of things and not just get rid of you as soon as possible. Not saying all are, but certainly the ones I experienced. The health system here is dreadful, it’s not designed to cater for the size of the population and I don’t know if that’s why a lot of the medical profession (consultants and doctors more than nurses) seem disinterested in their job and treat patients like statistics instead of people.

I'm curious which 3rd world health service you have experience of that is so wonderful? I grew up and trained as a doctor in a 3rd world African country and I can absolutely assure you that even at its very worst the NHS is significantly better!

If a mother can't commit 9 hours to get medical help for her child that the child so desperately needs then that says more about the mother than any NHS service, am a single working mother but my child's health comes before anything so if it takes 9 hours or 9 days that's my priority!!!

A job, other children with needs, other caring commitments. It's not sustainable. You're victim blaming.

I’m also curios too! All 3rd world areas that I have worked in definitely did not have good or even anything that reflected healthcare.

Sorry, don’t want to say, but I also grew up in a third world country and obviously used the health services and they were definitely better than here.

And yes…name change fail.

I have to use “Out of Hours” GP service last week … DD came home from work to show me an infected toe.

Rang them at 9am, call back about 10:30, emergency GP appointment at 3:15, 4:30 we were out with anti-biotics - I have no complaints.

As an example, you didn’t have to wait 12 weeks for X-ray results while having quite severe breathing problems, and then another couple of months to see a consultant, as happened to a relative. If I had not been able to arrange for a private GP and consultant appointment, they wouldn’t have survived that long. In the country I grew up in all of this would have happened within days and they would have investigated instead of just assuming it was asthma that just came on out of the blue and fobbed them off with repeated steroids and antibiotics, leaving them to get to deaths door several times until it did finally kill them. Not only was the care there far better than the NHS, it was also superior to the private care you get here, by the same NHS consultant with the same indifferent attitudes.

I call bullshit. There is no where in the country that has waits of 12 weeks for a CXR.
I am also guessing that you uses private healthcare in your 3rd world country.
I am sorry you had a bad experience but you're talking bollocks

This.

If it’s not a huge emergency and your GP cannot book you in for an appointment, please try 111, and ask for an out of hours appointment.

We did this a couple of years ago about 9 pm, and ended up with a 1 am appointment, but were seen and back in the car with an antibiotic prescription within 30 mins. Far better than waiting for hours in A&E for several hours.

I've tried both private and public health care in a developing country. The public was very like the NHS if not better (obviously maybe not the same in different places and I'm not saying where it was!). You expected to wait all morning sitting in a corridor and you did see a qualified doctor within about five hours. The private was similar price to private GP here and exceptional. Either way, I'd rather be ill there.