To think this is a fucking joke - A@E wait?

[CanNeverThinkOfAName]

So our local hospital serves 350,000 residents from a large area.

Arrived at A&E at 11pm. Expected it to be packed and to have a long wait. There were around 15 patients waiting. At 3am there were 4 still in the waiting area plus us.

From that time only one person has been called to see a doctor and at least 10 people have gone out after being seen.

Ambulance staff check patients in near where we are sitting and only 3 have checked in since we got here.

Obviously not a busy night.

AIBU to think this is totally piss take and the staff must be on a bloody go slow or something?

The A and E had free drinking water in the waiting area and vending for drinks and snacks. We were there at night into the small hours but, in the day, its not far from the hospital cafe.

My Dad, who was in a bed in A and E, was offered free tea/coffee/water twice during his 7 hours from a trolley.

When I went last year they were brilliant but on the TV yesterday there was discussion about the number of people waiting over twelve hours and it was scandalous. My daughter was quite unwell before Christmas and when she checked the wait time in her local A and E was 13 hours (Wales). Generally the NHS seems to be underfunded to the point of being completely broken. The whole system is awful and each awful part makes the next part worse. People can't get a timely GP appointment so they get more sick or frightened and go to A and E. A and E get busier, waiting times longer, no bed capacity in the main wards because poor adult social care mean beds are taken by the waiting well. It's a very sorry state of affairs. It's also very frightening. The idea that actually it's quite hard to get someone to help you.

So the option is leaving the ward unstaffed or a member of staff sitting at a desk doing their paperwork and having a coffee and something to eat?

Maybe the NIL by mouth patient would be fine with the ward left unstaffed and obviously no other patients on the ward should be allowed to eat should they. Bit awkward if you are in for days or weeks and various people being NIL by mouth, you might be very hungry by the end of the week.

The issue is the demands on the nhs are increasing without the increase in funding. So we are paying something for it, but people want champagne service for lemonade money. We aren’t paying enough to fund a service the functions well, so we haven’t got one.

It wasn’t that long ago that people were out within 4 hours.

it’s almost like cutting Social Care budgets, reducing the amount of primary care, reductions in the number of Drs and Nurses in training (making us reliant on people from Europe), the post-Brexit increase in the cost of medication, and the vast profits of energy supply companies who supply the hospitals …. Have had a negative impact.

Of we only had a government who prioritised Health & Social Care ….

This is true based on purely GDP numbers BUT what you have not factored in is population levels.
Bit like with "the UK is the worlds 5th richest economy" GDP yes, per capita, we are 29th.

Per capita, the UK spends considerably less than the countries you list, we are below average in the OECD too.

Govt figures on this are also rather misleading, they inc all the additional Covid spend & private health in their numbers.

They did this with education spending, included student debt in how much the UK spends on education.

I often wonder why they have such uncomfortable chairs in A&E waiting rooms. I don't know if it is deliberate, they are cheap or whoever buys them never sits in them.

Might just be our local hospital but even if fit and well i.e. accompanying the sick/injured person, they are torture after about five minutes.

You are not being unreasonable to feel this way but please don't blame the staff. My sons partner is a nurse in A&E and has been for a number of years. She had always loved it despite working, with and without PPE, during the horrors of Covid and the general decline of the NHS but she's finally had enough. She has just reduced her hours for her own wellbeing and is now looking to get out. She feels it's no a longer safe environment and so often she unable give the level of care she would wish due to the pressures in the department.

It seems like there are a lot of people who might be regretting voting Conservative on this thread, desperate to blame staff rather than the systemic destruction of national assets over 20 yrs...

I spend a lot of time in NHS hospitals, mostly outpatients but A&E occasionally. Also DH and many relatives use it extensively. It's bloody brilliant.
I was going to write a long post but I'm bored listening to myself on this subject and so many people will just disagree with me, which they are allowed to do

Low productivity is sometimes a result of people slacking... But it is usually systemic.

Lack of adequate resources, process, support and so on.

It's much easier to imagine people slacking than to get our head around the complexities of system management (and indeed nobody who isn't responsible for that system should be expected to), so I completely understand you reaching for that interpretation in such a stressful situation, OP, but I highly doubt it's the right interpretation.

NHS staff do work incredibly hard - but that doesn't mean that we don't experience terribly poor levels of care as end users. So both staff and patients are being equally failed.

My sister in law was brought into a&e by the police after attempting suicide twice in 1 evening. She was left to sit on a chair waiting for the crisis team/psych team. She sat there for 14 hours, very quietly and without fuss. No one assessed her, no one monitored her sufficiently. After 14 hours she walked out, walked to a nearby woodland, and committed suicide.

The hospital has been fairly good at admitting fault and trying to make changes, but the changes don't seem big enough and I suspect it will happen again.

I don't want to be grateful to the NHS for how hard they work. I want a fair equitable health care system where people don't suffer and die needlessly. Waiting 14 hours, unseen and unsupported, when you are in crisis, is not good enough.

This is what happens when you have an incompetent conservative government with an agenda to destroy the nhs

Just to add - I'm sure no one was slacking on the day my siL was let down so terribly. I'm sure they were all really, really at their jobs. But we can't pretend that makes it okay, just because people are working their absolute arses off. Individual staff members are working very very hard, and it's still not good enough

as even the IFS points out, this is unlikely to be explained by staff themselves working less hard or being less productive,

What it is more likely explained by is

• Chronic understaffing of health and social care so patients who are unable to be discharged safely ‘block beds’.

• The fact that the increase in staffing is medical and nursing but there has been a corresponding decrease in administrative staff which is likely correlated with decreased efficiency. With the previous increase in NHS funding under Labour which the IFS demonstrates increased efficiency, there wasn’t the political need to push up healthcare Staff numbers And keep management and admin low. Good management and strong admin keep healthcare efficient and keep healthcare staff happy doing the jobs they’re paid for,

     . WTE posts which is what they look at do not reflect the skill mix (lots more very junior nurses while experienced staff flee), the high sickness rates or the fact that many of those posts remain unfilled.

We probably do not pay enough, you are right. But I read so many excuses from NHS staff here that I am not sure if any amount of money will be enough to get a decent level of service. All those "You have no idea" replies meaning "Stop complaining and be grateful" from those who should care is really frightening.

@Dorisbonson this is simply not true, though I suspect that you are well aware of this already.

The UK has consistenly spent a lot less on NHS than the above countries spend on healthcare.

The only time that spending in the UK rose to match the above was during the pandemic. Suddenly, an amazing amount of money was made available to spend on contracts awarded without any proper tendering. These contracts were quickly given to friends of Toty politicians and people who had made political donations to the Tory party.

Yeah this. Can you not see it through the eyes of the patients @cantitbesimpler ???

No one does anything "merrily" as a member of staff in A&E at the moment. And asking if NHS staff can understand how patients feel is a bit rich. I spend every single shift mustering empathy for patients, I genuinely feel for everyone who has to face an overstretched service while scared or in pain.

It's not empathy that's in short supply.

No, they do not mean that. They mean that if you have not worked in the system you cannot possibly understand just how soul destroying it is. People blaming the staff for the state it is in is misdirected and adds to the problem.

I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 last week and was horrified to learn that the recent junior doctors' strike cost over £1 billion! Senior doctors had to cover for the striking doctors and they are highly paid. Imagine what could have been done with that money.

I don’t agree with it just a funding issue.

Local minor injuries here - open 8-6 pm - took my son on Thursday with a PE injury and suspected broken wrist / hand - checked in - 5 minutes. 5 minute wait seen by nurse. Yep sge agreed it could be broken or sprain but needed a x ray to confirm - given paperwork and sent to next room. Another 5 minute wait and then two x rays taken - back to waiting room another 5 minutes seen by the same nurse - it’s not broken but it is a bad sprain. Offered a wrist splint but she advised ice painkillers and keep it moving. We are a 20 minute drive away within an hour he was back at school.

in the same county a trip to the hospital would be a minimum of a 5 hour wait probably nearer 10 hours. Internal bleeding needs to be seen quickly - so that A and E is not fit for purpose.

you can’t get an appointment with a GP and that clogs everything up and that there is no decent facilities for mental health etc

I was talking about on a ward rather than A&E but in that case it was specifically stated that it was visitors who were complaining. I assumed patients did actually understand as they would see these people working 13 hrs without breaks.

The NHS is very, very broken.
I'm so sorry you've had to wait so long. It isn't acceptable and I guarantee you that the staff working in your A&E feel that way too.

It's impossible to know what a doctor is doing behind the scenes. They can be doing everything and anything from performing CPR, ordering bloods or scans, interpreting test results, examining patients, prescribing medicines, administering treatments, arranging admissions or transfers to other hospitals, answering a patient's questions, speaking to specialists on call, or breaking bad news to relatives. These things all take time. Some of them take a LOT of time.

In terms of NHS funding and resourcing, the health service is dealing with increasing numbers of complex cases as the population ages and becomes sicker. People can point to the figures but the fact remains that the UK spends a lower percentage of its GDP on health than most other comparable countries (e.g. France, Germany, Canada). Inflation means that yes, it's getting more money than ever before but the buying power of that money is reduced. The NHS is willfully underfunded.

All this is coupled with a recruitment and retention crisis across most health professions. Primary care pressures (see previous comments on ageing population - the biggest users of health services) then result in pressures on emergency care: people present with cases that could or maybe should be dealt with elsewhere because they can't get an appointment. Or, people leave things for so long that by the time they present for care they're so sick they need to go to A&E.

I've never seen things as bad as they are now. It's truly abysmal. Sadly, 10-12+hr waits are commonplace. A decade or so ago that would have been absolutely unheard of.

Again, I'm so sorry about what you've experienced. No one goes into healthcare to work in these circumstances and no one needing healthcare should expect to wait so long.

The strikes are not the problem although the government would love you to believe they are- they could have been avoided if junior doctors were properly paid to begin with.
What is more shocking is much money is not being paid in the pot because of tax evasion.