To think you don't quite realise how badly the NHS is suffering until you witness it first hand

[DaisyCat33]

My parents are sitting in A&E today. They've just hit 12 hours. My dad was sent there by his GP for severe neck pain this morning. He's had morphine and an MRI scan, but they're now endlessly waiting to see a Dr about results. He hasn't even got a bed to lay on, despite debilitating neck pain. Many people are standing or sitting on the floor.

The couple sitting next to them have been there since 3am, for difficultly breathing.

I'm shocked. Honestly I knew the NHS had it's issues, but this bad?! It's frightening. I also had an email the other day saying my NHS dentist is closing, and it's basically a "well sorry no dentist for you any more, bye bye"

I don't really know the point of this thread really, I just feel shocked and upset that this is how it is. And I think a lot of people don't even realise? My parents definitely didn't until today. They are losing the will to live sat in that hospital.

Does anyone else just feel utterly helpless and anxious about this?

Absolutely.
I'm very impressed with the French system (we have family there) but I'm under no illusions that it will cost less for the government or for us as a family.

When I broke a bone in my foot a couple of years ago I went to the MIU and was dealt with really well. I was seen by a nurse practitioner who immediately said she thought she knew what it was so I was xrayed and she was right.

My husband is disabled but still drives and he was sitting in the car park. I was happy to hobble out but the nurse practitioner insisted on putting me in a wheelchair and taking me out to him. I was treated so well.

On the downside we no longer have an A&E or MIU in my town and had to go past A&E in my neighbouring town to the next town to get to the MIU. Can't fault them once I got there though.

No, access like that is not universal.

I still can't make an online booking with my GP. It's the 08:00 telephone Hunger Games.

I certainly don't have access to other records or items.

We may as well be living in parallel universes for our different experiences of the NHS, it seems.

@RosesAndHellebores

It leads to too many NHS staff treating us as inconsequential, entitled ingrate who are unworthy of excellence - because it's free and we should be grateful.

Nail on the head! There are many excellent, caring, healthcare professionals, but also far too many of the "it's free, so be grateful of anything" ones too!

I waited 36 hours on chairs with my MIL from Monday this week. She had a head injury with a lot of blood loss. She’s a cancer survivor twice and collapsed and woke up covered in blood from her head. When she saw staff, the care was exemplary however - there was just no space because the system is broken. No one is moving through so you just get a log jam in a and e.

I'll believe that the NHS has financial issues when I don't have to walk across multi coloured LGBTQ supportive crossings at Leicester RI at £40k a time. It isn't always about how much money you have but what you do with it.

I never understand why IVF always seemed to be selected as the thing we need to consider, I assume that means don't provide it. I'm in my 70s so not skin in the game but I know in my area IVF is already rationed to one cycle.

Then I take a sick GC to A&E and it is full of drunks and footballers. One of the nurses said that is normal on a Sunday morning, drunks who have injured themselves on a Saturday night out and Sunday morning footballers. Maybe they should have to pay for their treatment. I assume the fracture clinic is probably busy on Monday as well.

Or then there was the man I was working with, he was very proudly raising money for the NHS by doing a parachute drop. He shattered his leg on landing and needed surgery and months of physio. He raised about £300 and cost thousands. Why not make health insurance for these sort of activities compulsory and then we could afford IVF for people who have fertility issues.

I never knew what an excellent set up we have here. This needs to be rolled out nationwide.

No it's not nationwide. There are none of my test results on the NHS app (nor patient access or whatever the other is called). Our GP surgery don't put them on.

OH has regular bloods for his chemo treatments for the oncology dept. He has to have separate bloods for his diabetes (controlled by GP). Neither have access to the other's records. (Same town!). When something else goes wrong, i.e. last year he had a broken foot, the orthopoedic dept needed their own blood test as they said they couldn't access either the oncology results (same hospital) nor the GP results. There's been times when he's had 2 or 3 different blood tests taken in the same week, once he had two taken in the same day, same phlebotomist, but for different depts!!

When he started his chemo, he was referred from our local hospital to a specialist cancer hospital (different town, but same county and same local NHS trust). He'd already had blood tests, skeletal x-ray, MRI scan and bone marrow sample done at the local hospital. The first thing the specialist at the specialist hospital arranged was all those tests again as he couldn't access the test results from the first hospital.

It's absolute madness. It's all far too fragmented, too many "ffiefdoms", not enough integration. When different depts in the same hospital can't access blood test results taken in the same phlebotomy dept, you know management is absolutely crap!!

It is ridiculous blaming the problems on time wasters (this will always exist) and people’s inability to self-triage.

There should be readily available primary care (as there always was). In virtually every first world country bar the UK (and even in plenty of developing countries) you can get a same day doctor’s appointment.

People often turn up in A&E as they don’t know whether it is serious or not, and it is their only access to medical care. A computer algorithm over the phone (111) isn’t really the same as an examination by an experienced primary carer.

I use a private GP (as do 30% of the population, I believe) to avoid the worry of whether I should ‘bother’ a GP, a question that wouldn’t even have been asked 20 years ago or in most other countries. If you can’t afford that, I think going to A&E if you are concerned, rather than waiting until things become more serious and less treatable, is the only rational thing to do.

This is a huge issue and related to GP access and 111 I feel. I had to attend A+E the other day after we got rear ended on the school run by another driver. Police attended and as air bags were deployed and we were hit at over 30mph with a toddler in the car police insisted we attend A+E. We were 4 hours waiting.

People we collapsing, ambulances bringing people in who needed ressuss. There were people sat all over the corridors, people in every seat, people stood everywhere. There was us and 1 other person under the age of 65. We were chatting to quite a few of the other patients, many of them were there due to falls in their homes. Some of the others were there for breathing problems but had very heavy colds. The couldn't get through to their GP and rung 111 who had sent them there. Many had been sat there over 6 hours.

The problem locally to us is all the local GPs are in large groups. All these GP groups have moved onto the Amina and have effectively turned off their phones. The voice message for our GP is book on the Amina system, the phones will not be answered until 9.30am, there is 1 receptionist on phones. If you need treatment today, you must book on Amina or go to A+E. Amina opens at 8.30, all appointments are gone by 9am. Anyone needing to use the phone cannot get an appointment. The group only allows that day appointment bookings. This is the same for all of the GP groups. Hence everyone at A+E in our area.

This.

I've been to my doctor recently for mental health issues and a lump. I've been put on a five year waiting list for the former, and was told I wouldn't reach the threshhold for the funding to have the latter removed. It's been slowly growing so eventually it will be big enough to 'reach the threshhold' but what other problems will it have caused along the way that the NHS will have to sort out? Leaving health problems doesn't miraculously make them go away, it makes them worse.

It's an ideological problem that the NHS is in this state because it's been systematically underfunded with a view to being privatised for the last 13 years.

@Dibblydoodahdah when we lived in Copenhagen they had a national system that didn't involve 'pay in' they do have 46% tax though but don't pay what we think of as NI -

Are you desperate to emigrate to a country with insurance-based healthcare which is better than the NHS?

Yep. Until you experience it you probably don't realise. My mum waited in A&E for 17 hours with acute abdominal pain (she went to A&E as desperate and couldn't get a GP to listen). She got told off by the receptionist for sitting on the floor at one point. Once seen she got diagnosed with very advanced cancer and had to be kept in - no beds so the nurses (who were absolutely trying their best) cleared out a cleaning cupboard and put a reclining chair in there so she could at least try and get some sleep. An elderly gent that got admitted the same time had a bed made up for him in a bathtub. It's a shambles and a crisis and utterly shameful that no one is really being held to account.

Also subsequently had ambulances come to our house and take her to A&E urgently and one waited outside A&E for six hours before they could find the space to take her in. An absolute waste of ambulance resources that could surely be fixed with better scheduling and organisation

Interesting post.... Now imagine what it's like for people who aren't white and those who are stereotyped, or those who have disabilities, or those with development problems and those who have communication issues.

https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opinion/racism-an-issue-in-nhs-finds-survey

Your wait for mental health is terrible, no getting away from that.

However lumps and bumps haven't been covered for years, they come under cosmetic, and you could get it sorted privately if you can afford it.

I think this is where people have to change their expectations, the NHS can no longer cover everything, for everybody, and for "minor" albeit irritating health issues accept that you need to self care for those.

Yes, it’s terrible. I’ve been saying this for the last 10 years trying to help elderly parents navigate the system, and it’s a lot worse now than it was then.

The NHS model is simply obsolete, you wouldn’t want to rely on a car built in the 1940s, you can only patch it up so many times before you have to ditch it completely and get a new one.

It should be above party politics, but I wouldn’t trust the civil service to do any better, (have you tried to get hold of HMRC or the DVLA recently?)and private initiatives are crap as well - think HS2. So basically we’re screwed.

@RethinkingLife I used to be a nurse and whilst I very much agree with the NHS I do think the country needs a reset in all kinds of ways- we need to look at why it still works relatively ok elsewhere but not the UK- that's everything from GP practice to not utilising or having enough minor injuries units attached to hospitals- to training people for roles , to whether 111 makes sense and maybe more 'walk in centres' might be preferable - to me it makes sense to have a minor injuries unit built within a hospital but separate- take out all the football injuries, broken fingers, drunk injuries, glass in a cut, sprained ankles etc from A&E -

It’s dreadful.
I was there a couple of months ago. I’d lost consciousness- possible seizure, dh called ambulance- they called back to say if I can walk take me in myself. I could once I came round - waited 12 hours overnight on a plastic chair to see a Dr who was clueless.

TW: mentions suicide attempts.

I agree. (please, read all this because this is awful treatment and noone shod have to go through this)

I was waiting from almost 5 years; January 2019 to December 2023 for an urgent appointment with the community mental health team (CMHT).

Whilst waiting, my GP used to say things like 'outside my area of expertise', 'well, I don't know what to do' which is fair enough - but every GP I saw refused to attempt to expedite the appointment due to me being seriously suicidal and attempting suicide.

In November 2023 I requested absolutely all my hospital notes, including emails between departments, transcripts of phone calls between the departments, referral letters etc and also wrote my MP giving examples of what the GPS said and refused to help with and what CMHT had said when I was chasing them up.

I miraculously got an appointment within two weeks of requesting my files and the MP being informed of the situation.

Almost 5 years living with the torture of suicidal ideation yet the knowledge and realization that this is not something I could do. The incongruity was so painful yet nobody understood, nobody cared, and nobody helped me fight my corner five fucking years.

I have now been having appropriate treatment for six weeks and the difference I have started to notice is unbelievable.

This makes me feel it's even more shocking that people are forced to live in such frightening disturbing mental conditions and no one seems to care about treating them.

Until you have had that daily harrowińg battle of being desperate for your life to end, but being unable to put your family through a different type of pain, I don't think it's possible to imagine the mental torture.

FIVE FUCKING YEARS!!!!!?

Isn't it true that noone can get a gp appointment as private companies such as Symphony have bought gp surheries and laid of expensive doctors. Hence putting pressure on nhs.
Basically this government hates sick people as they can't work and make £££ for them.

Yep, we were there last week due to my partners blood pressure being 210/120 and pills weren't bringing it down. I called the walk-in initially to see if they would see her (GP was closed) and they said they were now either sending everyone home or triaging them to A&E so just to go there.

It was pointless, in all honesty. They sent her home after 6 hours without trying to help her (GP was incredibly angry and said there was several meds she could have been given to lower it until she saw the Dr next day).

I may get some hate for this, but I don't know how to say it without sounding like a massive arsehole. But, I'd say at least a third of the patients in the waiting room were there due to substance abuse issues. The security guards spent hours policing them, and nurses were running around trying to get them free packs of sandwiches and coffees. One very drunk man was an absolute nuisance, and at one point faked a fit to try and be seen. One woman, very intoxicated, was wrapping birthday presents on the floor and telling everyone loudly it was for her daughter to make up for going out to get drunk! Utter shambles all round.