AIBU to be angry at A&E?

[fashu]

I'm currently in hospital A&E, I've been here for 9 and a half hours. I'm 35 weeks pregnant. AIBU for getting upset or should I just suck it up?

At 8pm last night I had the oncoming of a migraine, funny vision, light-headedness etc.
I went to tell my husband and called the midwife, then started having a chat with DH. Mid conversation I started talking nonsense. Instead of car I was was saying mayonnaise, on top of other things I was just talking crap.
I tried to Google the symptoms and I couldn't type either. I couldn't think of what I wanted to write, although I knew what I was doing and when I did think of the words it looked like this 'hdhcjsk'

I panicked a bit and went back to my husband and then I went completely numb on in my hands and my mouth. I panicked and told him to call an ambulance. Ambulance came just over an hour later and said I needed to go to hospital as it sounds like a mini stroke.
Queue major panic mode!

Paramedics called maternity unit they said its not for them but keep them updated.

So I arrived in an ambulance at A&E just after 12am. Went to majors and the triage said to wait in waiting room and they will tell senior doctors.

Well I'm still waiting. 35 weeks pregnant on a hard metal chair. For 9 and a half hours. Panicking that I've had a mini stroke.

I've told the reception and nurses several times that my belly is now hurting from sitting for so long and being awake for 26 hours. I asked for water and they said I had to use the vending machine for a can of coke.
Receptionist told me I'm not poorly enough for a bed or the arm chairs.

I'm so upset, emotional and scared. DH has dropped kids off at my mums now as they were asleep and didn't want to disturb them in the night.

But, am I right to be upset or is this just how it is? Surely a pregnant woman with suspected mini stroke should be left for this long alone without treatment?

What we need is a widespread, long-term improvement plan that encompasses all areas of society and functioning public services (imo) but just to start……

1. A national health and well-being promotion programme that encourages, educates, supports and empowers everyone to take personal responsibility for their own health and well-being because that is hugely lacking in large swathes of the general population.
2. Personal health & well-being added to the school curriculum to teach/educate and engrain into society that your overall health is your responsibility and the NHS is there if you are unlucky enough to need them.
3. A reintegration of social services into the NHS and reintroduction of step down care.
4. An overhaul of medical education programmes and recruitment strategies.
5. A national modernisation and technology programme to enable all parts of the NHS to speak to each other more effectively.
6. A realistic evaluation of job roles and their importance within the system.
7. Improved NHS estates and facilities management.
8. A realistic evaluation and overhaul of procurement procedures and red tape barriers that stifle innovation and improvement.
9. More flexible and supportive working environments coinciding with a management improvement programme to equip managers with the leadership, people management and innovation skills required for the role.
10. A stripped back NHS. It cannot offer everything and it needs to stop trying to do so.
11. A better death campaign which includes consideration of voluntary euthanasia under very strict criteria and with safeguarding mechanisms in place for those with terminally progressive illness/disease. This current notion of living at all costs vs quality of life is unhealthily imbalanced imo.

There’s so much more but none of this will ever happen because it would involve 5, 10, 20 year plans and projections that no government would consider in case they’re not in power in 10 years and can’t ‘take the credit’ for it.

My DD is wheelchair bound and while on a respite break had a horrific accident ( not her fault) broke both her tibias ( legs) and waiting SEVEN HOURS for an ambulance it's shocking!

Dear God. That's awful.

The NHS has gone well beyond broken. Decent, ordinary people shouldn't be afraid to have to use something they have contributed to but I certainly am.

The same thing happened to me @fashu, except instead of talking about Mayonnaise I was talking about Margaret Thatcher when I was trying to say ‘call an ambulance’

They said it was a TIA which was frightening, I was only mid 20s at the time and have a FH of stroke, but it’s been 10 years now and I’ve had no issues since.

OP I hope all is OK. It is completely unacceptable to have a 35 week pregnant woman waiting in A&E for any amount of time. It is unacceptable for anyone to be waiting in A&E for this amount of time.

Just a reminder that the NHS had a firm target of 95% of patients having to be seen, discharged, treated or moved onto the correct care within 4 hours of attending. It was resolutely kept to under Labour and in the opening years of the Tory administration. It's been scrapped by this government and now hardly met in half of attendances.

Political choices matter. They are not all the same. Vote. Participate.

Disgusting treatment, but not unusual.

Things are bad in the NHS, and will get worse.

Scary but true. It’s not until you experience it first hand that you truly realise how broken the system is.

My elderly Mum was treated so badly in hospital. You’re lucky to have your DH to support you. Lots of vulnerable people have nobody, and the way they are treated in hospitals is shocking.

I hope you are feeling better now op.

@PostItInABook I agree with you, and I'm a healthcare assistant. On A&E shifts I've been told I need to 'toughen up' more than once because I spend a little time talking to and reassuring patients and doing what I can to make them more comfortable.

Sounds exactly like my migraines. Hope you're feeling better soon, OP.

If they believed you had a stroke you would be nil by mouth until they have checked your swallow! They obviously don't think you have had a stroke but it's terrible of them to just leave you there with no explanation.

That ‘target’ was fiddled to within an inch of its life and didn’t really have a meaningful impact on actual patient care. As soon as a patient was approaching breach they were shoved in a ‘monitoring’ bay attached to, but not really for the figures, A&E, not sent to the appropriate / correct care.

You’re looking back with rose tinted glasses I think.

I’ve worked in the NHS since 2003. It wasn’t the rosy experience you’re portraying under labour. I spent shift after shift waiting with patients in hospital corridors even back then. The working conditions were poor then and they are poor now. What we’re seeing now is a result of years and years of general decline of conditions & funding with a year on year increase in patient numbers and staff attrition that would have happened regardless of which party was in charge.

Absolutely awful treatment!!

Exactly!
I worked in the NHS from 1996 to 2015 people are definitely looking back with Rose tinted glasses .

Some staff members do need to ‘toughen up’ in terms of building a healthy emotional resilience and tolerance to cope with the demands of the role but too many others seem to have degenerated into the incorrect view that to work in an NHS frontline role, particularly in A&E / emergency care, you need to be a hard-nosed robot devoid of any compassion or kindness. They lack the self awareness to recognise they are compassion fatigued and won’t take any professional responsibility or accountability for the way they treat patients. It’s always the patient, or the system, or the managers to blame. Fundamentally it is the system and to a lesser extent managers but each individual can make a choice about how they treat their next patient.

You keep doing what you’re doing. Patients won’t always remember what you did or how you did it, but they WILL remember how you made them feel. Sounds a bit cliché but it’s true. You only have to read threads on here with people describing their experiences to see that.

Also get red if DEI officers

I’m also surprised maternity didn’t see you, it could have been pre eclampsia!

If your prone to
migraines then these symptoms are quite common. I get it quite often where I think I’m speaking correctly but the words that actually are spoken are completely different.

Waiting times aren't going to reduce unless we either find a way to stop vast numbers of people using A&E inappropriately for a whole variety of reasons, or a massive increase in capacity across the board - more hospitals, more staff to fill them, more social care in community. Increasing demand without increasing capacity can only result in increasing delays.

Ultimately when your symptoms fully resolved, which obviously is a great thing to happen, meant you were no longer an emergency. There are different pathways across the country but in the region I work in a patient with fully resolved symptoms wouldn't be seen in a&e at all but referred to neuro tia clinic and seen in 24 hours for a review.

The pregnancy was the complicating factor really for a host of medical and medicolegal reasons. Ultimately it probably just helpful to have you be in the department for a long time where if you suddenly worsened you could be escalated straight away. You weren't an emergency/requiring actual treatment just awaiting a risk assessment about anticoagulants/routine assessment, they just don't have the capacity to provide beds for comfort for this reason, and this is a massive shame and absolutely we should work to a solution to stop this being the normal.

@PostItInABook your posts have been so sensible and constructive. Thank you.

@fashu I’m afraid I haven’t read the entire thread but I had to comment. The exact same thing happened to me at the same stage of pregnancy and it was diagnosed as an atypical migraine with transient aphasia. I have sent you a PM. I hope you’re doing okay.

I think we should all be angry at government policy, which is the reason for the nhs being in such difficulty.

PostItInaBook at 13.52
brilliant post couldn’t agree more.
also Peasand at 14:33 yes!

Hope everything is ok OP, I see they are suspecting CVT but just to comment for others I've had similar symptoms in the past and it was Hemiplegic migraine- looks like a stroke but isn't. Either way, they all have to be checked out for stroke and waiting 9hrs to do so is not acceptable!!

Not being alarmist and it does happen in pregnancy, but did they check for Thrombocytopenia?

This is dreadful. Imagine not even bothering to bring you a cup of water!!! As a midwife, I'm not happy that you are in a different hospital from maternity. You should be getting reviewed by obstetrics ASAP. They will also need to review your plan for birth as labour mightn't be a good idea. I hope you're getting well looked after now op.