Are they all hiding in a fucking fridge?

[noblegiraffe]

The government? Where is the leadership? The reassurance that the problem is being addressed with urgency? Cobra meetings? Horrendous stories coming out of A&E departments right now.

Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary today announced on twitter that people should download the Couch to 5k app to reduce pressure on the NHS.

twitter.com/stevebarclay/status/1609957311610556416?s=61&t=rHTkCD1w_H9OmH9UB2E4UQ

Do your fucking job, Steve. And Rishi, show some leadership. You bloody wanted this job so badly, where have you gone?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64142614

And yet we're still sending Foreign Aid to countries with economies larger than ours who have money to have a space programme but apparently none to feed their poor!
Time to look after our own and stop Foreign Aid!

Foreign Aid is largely used to meet the interests of Britain abroad.

I didn’t realise things in the UK were this bad!

A 2% pay rise for NHS workers means that they will be paying to go to work through their taxes because the rate of inflation is higher than 2%. This is the most ridiculous thing ever!

The UK government have always been a load of arseholes but they are actually outing themselves as arseholes now!

I honestly didn’t think that after reading about some stupid scheme to turn off electricity, I would find out on MN that things are so much worse.

When I left the UK initially, I knew the health service was bad, but it would appear that consistent underfunding year on year has now managed to skyrocket what was a struggling system into a system that is so overwhelmed by the pressures on it, that people are having to go without essential treatment for weeks!

The fact that medically fit patients aren’t being discharged is so absurd that in other circumstances it would be comedic. The priority of any healthcare system should be discharging patients to make way for admissions but there seems to have been some kind of breakdown in the chain. Possibly because although those patients don’t require hospital treatment, they may require homecare and those services may be so overwhelmed that they can’t sustain yet more people coming into that system.

I would also question if this health minister has ever worked in a hospital. Has he ever tried to do a nursing assistants job? Or even better been and shadowed a nurse on a ward for a few days? Perhaps getting up at 5am to get ready and be on site for handover at 7am would be good for him! Especially if he gets to go to a hospital an hours drive from his house, gets to do that whole shift, go home, and then start again the next day. I wonder how sustainable he would find that if he had to do that for days into weeks into months into years, until he could finally semi-retire by doing less shifts at the age of 68, so he could afford to live by supplementing his meagre pension with a meagre wage!

It was perfectly fit for purpose about 13 years ago.

@JoanOfAllTrades It is because there is no overall strategy. Instead they cut and cut every year the budget to local authorities so they have to cut what they spend. As a result the amount of money they give to care homes and carers for elderly people with no income to pay for this goes down and down. This means carers get paid very low wages and with the cutting off immigration we do not have migrants coming to take these jobs. So there are vacancies that can't be filled. At the same time there are cuts to staffing teams who manage equipment delivered to people's homes and assessments and equipment to stop people having falls. A lot of this used to be provided for free but is now charged for, so elderly people who were reluctant in the first place to have it now don't have those grab rails installed.
Its all about cutting expenditure from things they think does not matter, and instead causing chaos elsewhere and more money spent keeping people in hospital. It is so inefficient.

@verdantverdure I agree. This situation has been created. Sorting out care itself would make a massive difference.

They haven’t said that at all. Disappointing @noblegiraffe

I was very ill last week, possibly flu. Suddenly far more ill about 2 days after getting better. Needed antibiotics.
Did eventually get antibiotics after phoning 111. Missed several calls as finally slept.
Think I would be extremely ill without them, and starting to feel better.

You’re right, it’s all crumbling to pieces and they’re doing fuck all

All of this plus spend the same amount on improving aftercare. People get stuck in hospital because there isn't enough provision for their care once they're discharged. they are ready to go home or on to a rehab facility, but no bed in rehab and not enough carers/occupational health etc to make sure they'll be safe at home. so people get stuck in A&E waiting for a bed to be available, then people are stuck on trolleys/in ambulances waiting for and A&E bed, ambulances can't go back out because they are stuck outside waiting for their patient to be admitted for hours, so people end up waiting 16+ hours for an ambulance. National healthcare needs to be a full circle, until they join the dots and provide adequate funding and pay & conditions for EVERY part of it, there will be issues. This is not new news, it's been like this for years and they've done NOTHING about it apart from cut us off from being able to quickly fill gaps in staffing thanks to Brexit without having an immigration policy ready to go to make up for it.

Was impressed by the number of doctors who called. Really felt terrible

@BradfordGirl

I don’t think there is any easy solution. Having worked for the NHS (nurse), I wouldn’t be able to go back to that grind again and it’s a sad state of affairs when migrants are needed to staff the jobs that people living in the UK don’t want to do, for whatever reason. Especially when the unemployment rate is 3.8% and the economic inactivity rate for working age people has increased to 21.4%. The whole system needs to be overhauled from hospitals to homecare to nursing home care!

I m awake as I have been every night since Christmas Eve crying in agony as I have an infection in my foot and no skin on any of my toes. The pain is unreal. My antibiotics aren’t working and I am so fed up of the constant pain. I can’t walk, I can’t drive and I can’t do anything for myself. I have ruined everyone’s Christmas because of it. But I now can see a light at the end of the tunnel and I m off for a 5k run!! FFS.

I agree with protesting, but really people are about a decade too late.
It's going to take at least that to sort out this mess

The Country has been systemically stripped of the things that held it together. We have dysfunctional healthcare, dysfunctional housing, dysfunctional privatised rail, dysfunctional public services, a dysfunctional Government. We import more than we export and the deficit will grow further while we continue along this line of producing little and trading houses to each other.

The irony now is that if we re-entre Europe we'll be doing so as one of the poorer countries.

It’s a shit show

Are you a diabetic? If so, you need to go to the hospital, as a matter of urgency and get that infection seen too.

Has a wound care management plan been put in place by whoever gave you the antibiotics? Is the wound dressed at all, or just open?

I would urge you to go to hospital asap because antibiotics can only do so much. Also, it would appear from what you say that the skin is being eaten away by the infection. Or was the skin sloughed off initially?

An open infected wound is asking for trouble.

It needs proper treatment and a wound care plan put in to place. At the very least, the hospital should send a swab for analysis, get you reviewed by the wound care specialist nurse and revisit your antibiotics as they might not even be the right ones. Not every infection is susceptible to every antibiotic.

@JoanOfAllTrades i m not diabetic no, I have had plantar facilitis for the last two months and I think the infection has been caused by the swelling in my foot and how I ve been walking. I only have antibiotics and need to go back to the GP Friday if there’s no improvement. It’s been left open as I need to bathe it and air it to try to make it heal. I am really reluctant to go to a and e as it’s chaos down there, like something out of a disaster movie. MIL was admitted with pneumonia last week and waited three days to get on a ward.

Thank you for your reply though it makes me feel less alone.

Rapidly resigning myself to the fact that this is the government that will kill me.

I cut myself today, not a huge wound but deep, pouring blood rather than oozing or dripping, fat showing through...

I am an insulin dependent diabetic, with other relevant factors that make this a more serious wound than it might initially appear...

I had to make the call not based on what was best for my health or 'who is the most appropriate person to fix this' but based on wait times and other people being a higher priority.

Its good that I know things like 'if I can still flex my finger and feel the tip of the finger, its probably not that bad' and 'if its pouring blood then its likely to have washed out any debris' and that I had the necessary kit to clean the wound and dress it myself (an upside to pressure sores... I have half a pharmacy in here)..

Not everyone is capable of that level of self assessment and self care. Those people will be avoiding expert treatment, and putting themselves at high risk of infections.. then they have to try and get a GP appointment to be seen and get antibiotics... good luck with that.

As a nurse, I would say that since wounds need moisture to heal them and keeping the wound open could potentially dry out any new epithelial cells that are trying to repopulate the wound and grow new skin.

From working in hospitals in various countries, I have come to the conclusion that very few doctors, except surgeons, really know how to properly treat and manage wounds and infections! There have been so many times when a doctor (even the all so high and mighty consultants) have ordered a wound to be treated in a way that’s almost guaranteed to make things worse!

A swab needs to be taken to ensure that whatever the doctor has prescribed will work as different bacteria are susceptible to different antibiotics. Additionally there are different dressings infused with different substances to help kill and leach out the infection (such as silver dressings to manage both acute and chronic wounds with exudate (pus etc.,) as well as ulcerated wounds).

Ask your GP if there is a wound care nurse attached to the surgery that you can see and have the wound evaluated. Once the skin is broken, it’s an infected wound, not an infection and needs to be assessed and treated accordingly.

For there to be an infection, it must have been introduced in to the foot somehow which leads me to suspect that the swelling possibly caused the skin to breakdown/split somewhere (maybe under the foot where you couldn’t see) allowing the bacteria to enter the foot.

Blood doesn’t always clean away debris, even in a gushing wound so please do ensure that you clean your finger well, using the “one swab, one direction, one wipe” way so that you know that you’re definitely getting any bacteria out. And please cover the wound to help epithelial cells to populate the wound. If there is any redness, swelling, exudate, call an ambulance and off to ED, regardless of wait times! Oh, and please don’t use tap water for any cleaning of the wound.

I disagree. There’s a difference between ‘protecting the NHS’ by curtailing freedoms and imposing lockdowns, then encouraging people to look after their health - not just to save money but because for individuals, prevention is far better than a cure. It’s Disney thinking that we can all abuse our bodies and if the NHS was ‘good enough’ it would be able to seamlessly solve all our problems. Medicine hasn’t yet found a way of preventing the morbidly obese from having heart attacks or furring up arteries, they can make it less likely with medication but that’s it. Equally it hasn’t found a way of curing diabetes or draining the tar from a smoker’s lungs.

The advice to 'not go to work with a fever' has been super helpful. I manage residential care services for mentally ill people. We already have nowhere near enough staff. They are currently calling in sick one by one. I've got service users with covid/flu. Staff all off. No agency available. I can't cover my services. This is worse than at the height of the pandemic.

Social care has needed reform for as long as I've worked in it. But this is dire and I'm quite close to handing in my notice because I can no longer bear the stress of not being able to look after my service users any where near adequately.

And yes to answer the op-where the fuck are our great leaders? And why are the opposition not also loudly asking that question?

I work in a care home and I didn't believe the state of the NHS until I seen it with my own eyes after sitting in A+E with patients three times in the last few weeks. There were corridors lined full of people, ambulances queued up waiting to unload people, they were running out of portable oxygen tanks for under the trolleys as so many people were waiting on trollies that all of the oxygen tanks were being used up, i heard them say 'once they are gone they are gone, there's no more' so they were trying to get people out of cubicles who weren't reliant on oxygen. The cubicle bays were being divided up into smaller and smaller sections to try and get more people in, there were beds with people on blocking the bottoms of the cubicles so the bed had to be moved to get into the cubicle. Patients from resus were being moved into majors with a doctor and a nurse from resus accompanying them as there was no more room in resus. I heard an older gentleman asking for a urine bottle for around an hour and he was told that he couldn't use one until they found him a cubicle. One of the ladies at my care home in her 90's had a fall with a head injury that was actively bleeding and we were told to sit with her try and keep her awake until an ambulance came and she couldn't be moved as the wound poured with blood every time she moved, she waited around 8 hours on a cold wooden floor for an ambulance to arrive. It's horrendous.

Elevated and applied pressure - that took about ten mins as each time I stopped that, it started to flow again (not spurting though, slow steady flow).

Once it quit getting red everywhere, wiped with skin-suitable alcohol wipes, stung a bit but the wound did not pop back open to the point of fat showing through (phew, won't lie, that squicks me out a bit!).

I'm guessing the risk of debris is low/middling - its more of a stab wound, not a slice so its deep and narrow so that bumps it up a bit, but it was a super sharp (I sharpen my knives scary sharp!) and I was working on a new clean bit of limewood, not a nasty scabby bit that had been out in the shed or something (working on the freshly cut inside grain rather than the dirty outside)...

There is a chance, there is always a chance and my work desk is hardly a clean environment.. but I figured the 12+ hour wait put me at a higher risk of catching covid, and a low chance of them finding anything tiny in there (wood, wouldn't show up on xray)..

We shall see, I will not shy away from asking for help if it goes weird, hot, red, streaky, oozy etc etc.

It is currently elastoplasted reasonably tightly to stop it popping open (it was staying sealed shut with the finger straight but trying to pop with finger flexed, on its own). I did put a drop of honey (not the fancy schmancy stuff but a new bottle, not full of toast crumbs) on it, and will change the plaster tomorrow.

Finger currently normal colour, not painful particularly, not throbbing or hot.

Thanks for advice, tis appreciated :) I do refuse to die of a stabbed finger!!!