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?

Complaining on MN about things like A&E wait times or education is pointless. Everyone knows that MN would rather see these things get worse as long as the Tories ‘know what a woman is’.

She is an OT & yes highly qualified, its just that the NHS doesn't see them as such, other companies and countries do and neither do you with that opening comment.

I, like you can only speak anecdotally.

I have had numerous dealings with the NHS over many years and Governments, both for myself, my children and my Mum,before and after her death.

Apart from one incident when i was 14, i have always had brilliant experiences with the NHS, GPs and associated staff.

The care my mum got, in particular was amazing, all things considered as the 3 ward bays incredibly short staffed - 1 staff nurse to 32 patients, the HCA's were run off their feet.... so we had to organise a rota to feed her at meal times, we did this not to help out the NHS per se but to ensure patients without family would be feed, it also meant more time with mum.

This is very true.

How is your daughter, @CanNeverThinkOfAName ?

The Royal London Hospital is dire for inpatients. No cleaners, no catering/ serving staff, Bathrooms filthy, Nurses desperately short staffed, often seemingly incompetent, ward nurses incapable of giving meds on time/ accurate doses leaving multiple stab victims crying in pain all the time, No TV/ radio, shite wifi, shite mobile signal. Tea served (begrudgingly) with water from a hot tap (not boiled), No porter chairs or porters anywhere to be found, lifts that take up-to 10 minutes to arrive...That's before we get into the way they missed a collapsed lung with litres of blood in it, meaning the patient had to be blue lighted back there a week after being kicked out at midnight.

This is the major trauma expert hospital for London. Allegedly.

Mis management ,astronomical waste and inefficient working practices are a bigger contribution to the NHS shortfall and let’s not mention the lack of personal responsibility for your own health

I'm guessing since the OP hasn't been back (vindicated by something very serious happening on NHS turf), that the doctors and nurses (who spent years training in emergency situations) nailed their assessment and the ADULT child was placed in the correct priority order? The sheer entitlement on these threads is bewildering. Like the NHS is manned by morons, yes they are very overworked, no they probably don't give a shit that an ADULT is accompanied by their parent, however concerned the latter may be.

You can't judge someone as not in need just because you can't see it. When you say 'seeking painkillers for unspecified reasons' that described me last year. I even managed to walk into A&E by myself and sit on my phone while waiting. I had severe sepsis due to my bowel perforating.

I waited 6 days to go to the hospital because I wasn't sure I was sick enough and I'm sure some people on here would have advised me not to. After all I just had some unidentified pain right. I could have died if I'd listened to advice like that.

I wonder if NHS employees working in administration side on very high salaries in our trust keep a low profile when asked what they do for a living.

I can understand nurses in our trust becoming agency nurses. The permanent roles can be bad because of internal policies. Our consultants priority lists are chopped and changed by administration all the time.

In international comparisons, the NHS scores well in terms of efficiency.

The latest Alzheimer's medication, shortly to be introduced, isn't going to fail because the NHS is inefficient but because the NHS lacks scanners and diagnostics to test for the specific rogue protein.

You really should look at per capita spend (on health) in the UK compared to European health systems before coming out with inaccurate comments.

Yes wouldn't it be nice if the Govt funded public health and council leisure services & if schools hadn't had to sell of playing fields?

It does sometimes seem that the NHS is manned by morons.

A pathological aversion to implementing ideas that were 'Not invented here' but which improve efficiency elsewhere.

or (Trigger Warning for the humane) starving vulnerable patients to death:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/other/man-with-downs-syndrome-died-in-hospital-after-not-being-fed-for-nine-days/ar-BB1i0I7q

You need to find yourself some more reputable news sources, msn doesn't cut it where I'm from. I didn't say the NHS was perfect, just that its generally quite good at screening and priority. Your example I feel is a one off, and it sounds like that poor person didn't deserve to die. Anyway - we will wait to hear from the OP - to see if it is the case that NHS did a perfectly good streaming job. Presumably if they hadn't the OP would have been on it like a dog on chips.

Old age is a privilege!! At what age should we die off then! The young paying for us. Sitting on £400k,instead of paying for our care. My little 2 bed bungalow isnt worth anything like that. But where would I live, selling it to pay for my treatment?I trained (nursing) in the 70s, spent a great deal of my 40s years in the NHS. 15 years ago, I had a hernia repair, I took a bank loan and paid for it. I have always lived a sensible lifestyle, not smoking, drinking to excess, making sure I excercise, don't gain weight,to make sure I don't put pressure on the system. I'm a pensioner, very small NHS pension 12 years pay in. This week I am having 2 malignant growths removed privately. I don't have savings,we spent the pension lump sum future proofing our property, before retirement. After 18 months of agony I saw a private dermatologist, unfortunately some others issues have come to light, and of course I had gone private! I don't think my children would consider my old age,a problem...I have been giving free childcare for 28 years, whilst working nights.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67512566

Mistakes do happen even though they shouldn't.

I know Dad mostly ate last hospital stay because family went in and fed him on visits - he was struggling to feed himself and to eat some of the food provided - staff were aware but very busy - they were aware of many things that never got dealt with - he was also abruptly discharged and promise care package not sorted and back in hospital less 24 hour later via blue lights - GP and District nurses said he'd been discharged too soon. I think a system and staff under pressure you get things that shouldn't happen happening more.

Remind me again, how much money did the NHS waste on pronoun badges?

So, that man's life was only worth 22,500 quid? It's very sad that it's cheaper to pay the survivors for a person's death than it would be to treat them.

@RosesAndHellebores wow I don’t really know where to start with your comment. I’m sorry that you’ve obviously had such a lot experience with the nhs. That doesn’t mean that the hard working staff deserve to have their pay continuously eroded at a faster rate than the rest of the public sector and a far faster rate than the private sector. Because you’re frustrated that the govt won’t fund services doesn’t mean I should tolerate a frankly huge pay cut whilst we work harder than ever.

Ultimately in a life and death situation I imagine you want the best possible consultant looking after you. The best and brightest are leaving uk medicine now. They can’t pay their mortgage, can’t pay childcare around insane imposed shift patterns and commutes and the pay is almost double in the Republic of Ireland and Australia. This is an emotionally and academically demanding job, with the ultimate responsibility we deserve to be paid fairly for our skills and hard work.

I’m sorry that you’ve had such a bad experience. But most nhs staff have dedicated their life to helping others and work in increasingly difficult circumstances. We don’t give up on patients, you’re welcome to hate us all, be rude about us online but it won’t stop us turning up every day and trying to help patients in an organisation that has been run into the ground by a decade of mismanagement.

Also if you think doctors have job security go to the uk doctors subreddit. Plenty of doctors unable to get jobs, the govt won’t fund the posts. Most patients are lovely and grateful and I’m just gonna chalk this up to you having other things going on in your life right now, I wish you the best of luck. If you’d like to join us, if it’s that easy and we’re just going a terrible job then you are welcome to apply for medicine, nursing or any other number of allied health professions and start your training.

I don’t think any of my comments are inaccurate and that is based on personal experience

of course funding is an issue but we need to get out of the mindset it’s just lack of funding thats the problem

anyone who thinks just throwing money at the NHS will fix it is quite frankly stupid

Source please? I work in a Trust with around 8,000 employees and work Trust-wide... not one person I've seen has their pronouns on a badge

Please ignore, but the pedant in me has to correct my spelling error - "their" should of course be "there".

As you were.

Not sure if the other poster will be back or not, but for the record I found these two articles in less than a minute of searching;
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/12/500k-taxpayer-money-spent-pride-month-public-sector/
"Spending on LGBT-themed events, merchandise and sponsorship in June totalled £554,000 across police forces, NHS trusts, councils and fire services, figures show.
Research conducted by the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) think tank found the Greater London Authority was the highest spender, with City Hall spending £126,700 on grant funding, T-shirts and flags."

Ik how MN feels about Daily Mail articles, but there's also this;
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13067853/nhs-stonewall-rainbow-badge-gendered-language.html
"After this paper's exposé last August, Whitehall officials started looking into the scheme, which was awarded £220,000 by NHS England in 2021. "

And not that anecdotal evidence seems to mean much, but fwiw I've seen pronoun badges and lanyards being used within the NHS in at least 2 different areas.
It's not made up just because you aren't personally seeing it - That's the same logic MRA's will use to suggest that women don't face large scale sexual issues with men. "Well none of the women in my life have said anything so it can't be that big of a problem!" etc

Wow....from pronouns to MRA... that's quite a reach.

Also neither of those articles refer to 'thousands being spent on pronoun badges'. I'm not saying the badges in the article are necessary or should have had money spent on them but would like the facts to back up this particular statement.

Also my Trust is one of the largest in the country so I feel in this case that anecdotal evidence is valid i.e. we spent exactly £0 on pronoun badges.

£554,000 is a lot of money but if it is across NHS, Police, Fire and councils it is much less significant than it sounds. I can't imagine what the budgets for all those services come to but £554,000 spread across them all would be a tiny percentage of their spending.

I've read the NHS is £181 billion a year and the most up to date I can find for the police is £19 billion.

I have no political leanings either way (I think they are all crooks), but I fear that those are waiting for The Great NHS Reform and Improvement when Labour return to government, are going to be sorely disappointed…….

I agree. Think how long it will take to chang and resolve never mind resource the current demand. This is the work of years