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?

Yes, if you are well enough to go home and come back again that's GP territory.

It would be completely impossible to manage an ever-evolving set of patients coming and going. Do we employ another member of staff to assess how near a Dr is from finishing with a patient (which changes all the time according to results/referrals etc) - in order to precisely time your return? We'd need a whole new system detailing how long the return journeys were likely to be. And who is doing the texting?

A long wait in A&E is miserable but the system is set up for accidents or emergencies. So for the averagely healthy person it is fortunately a rare trip.

Yes, you are right

Please don't let a loved one stay alone in A&E my son was there this week. High temperature, delirious, blood coming out of one ear. Six hours before he saw a doctor. His wife advocated for him four times, he did get morphine. Doctor put him on antibiotics intravenous plus morphine he waited a full day in there before being taken to the ward. Two days later they diagnosed streptococcal meningitis.

I’ve attended A&E with DH this week, he’s got a urine infection, he was already taking antibiotics for it but he’d stopped urinating. 2am call to 111, the advice was to call our GP at 8am. Two hours later He was in agony so I called again. Still same advice, I then called 999, they were so helpful, the operator sent us to a department next to A&E called Same Day Emergency Care where he was assessed and from there sent straight through to A&E, we’d just sat down when he was called into triage, his bladder was scanned and sent straight through to cubicles to have a catheter fitted. It filled two catheter bags straight away, no wonder he was in agony. Bloods and urine samples were sent off to the labs which took about two hours. A different antibiotic was prescribed. We’ve been back to the SDEC unit for a follow up cultures and blood tests, he’s had another change of antibiotic.
The hospital is a major teaching hospital and has a Major Trauma unit, all trauma patients go in via a separate entrance to walk in A&E.
It has its own paediatric A&E. and when my gd was sent from ooh gp they were waiting for her at the reception. She was in DKA, a complication of diabetes and straight through to resus past a full waiting room.

Tell me you've never worked in a&e without telling me you're never worked in a&e 🤣

The ignorance in the OP is breathtaking.

Hopefully the OPs adult child has now been seen.

The OP has no idea what issues came in with the few ambulances. Not does she have any idea how many staff are on duty and what other areas they are potentially having to cover. Not to mention trying to find beds for people admitted.

But yeah....they are on the go slow

I spent 7 hours at A&E waiting for stitches last year. I bled through the temporary bandages 3 times and had to ask for more. The guy next to me was in a similar state: industrial accident and heavy bleeding. The triage nurse kept patching us up with extra bandages but we were making a bloody mess between us. Quite literally.

The staff were working hard. So hard. I couldn't fault that. But there were peculiar things that didn't help (related to the systems not the people). For example, once stitched, I needed a tetanus jab and they were stored in sight of where I was being stitched. The person stitching me up had to fill in a form, find somebody else and get it signed off and then somebody else administered the tetanus jab. It added another 90 minutes to the wait. It reminded me of when my Grandma was dying and she'd been prescribed anticipatory meds to prevent discomfort. And nobody was allowed to administer them. We waited and waited for somebody with the right letters after their name. They arrived too late (17hrs after they were requested). Even the paramedics weren't allowed to give them and it caused a dying woman additional distress. I genuinely considered giving them myself (I'd been her carer for years and had the ability but not the permission).

Add in all the people having clear mental health crises and it was clear why my local hospital is in special measures. Not the staff's fault at all.

No, 4 to 5 hours is not at all unusual for a&e.
Its usually more like 12 hours here.
It was also a Saturday night. Less staff in the hospital

@CanNeverThinkOfAName was it Treliske?

I once spent all night there in A and E with broken bones. There were about five of us and nobody was seen until 5am when the doctor arrived to start his shift. Apparently there was no doctor available in A and E all night until then. People were passed out on the floor and being sick. I am surprised nobody died.

As PP have said, you keep voting Tory and this is what you will get. We have an ageing demographic who need more NHS care. The birth rate is falling, and the only way to generate more tax payers is immigration. But the Tories hate foreigners, so we are stuffed.

Plus the pay and conditions in NHS are so bad they can’t staff it anyway unless they are allowed to employ immigrant labour.

This. You don't see the most serious cases in A&E waiting rooms. When my dad had a heart attack he was taken straight in at the back and a team was on his chest straightaway.

@LadyPenelope68 well of course people are going to A&E instead of the GP because in some practices you won't get an appointment. That isn't misuse, it's using what's available. There's a GP suite in both my three local hospitals, we either sort out GPs or hospitals all have that availability.

OP - We've been in A&E twice in the past year. One was in Exeter for my son's broken wrist and the other Wexham for my daughter's broken arm. Neither were complex breaks, but both were obviously fractured.

In Exeter it took us 4 hours to be seen, although there were only a few people in the waiting room, when we got to the cubicle - again it too another hour to get an x-ray, after another hour had gone past and I'd listened to all the staff have a chat about what they were doing at the weekend and how Dav was getting on in his new job, I went and asked if the x-ray was back and we looked at it together and then I got someone to get a brace for it out of the cupboard and put it on DS and we finally left. Honestly it was painful.

In Wexham, it was busier, but much more organised. More people in the waiting room, but triaged, x-rayed and given a sling with a couple of hours. No dithering.

As a HCP myself, I don't stand around chatting when there is stuff to be done. I did briefly work for the NHS and the levels of bureaucracy, apathy, dithering and waste drove me insane.

Interesting stats but I think it’s more than just numbers. I’m a nurse and the type of patient is changing - when I first started nursing, you would use a translator maybe once every 6 months - now it’s every shift.

patients who need translators take about 4 times as long. Plus if they are female, a chaperone may be needed which is essentially a female member of staff being taken off the floor to just stand there.

people are also older and with multiple chronic conditions and possibly dementia, again adding to the challenge of obtaining information and watching them if they are prone to wandering off.

I did an extra shift in a vaccination clinic. I had a family of asylum seekers. It took nearly an hour to assess them for vaccine eligibility via a telephone-translator, only for the father to then just say “no” to all vaccines.

I’m not wanting to victim blame but there needs to be a realisation that the population demographics have changed and the additional work burden that comes with that needs funding.

Sorry to hear that happened.

When my dad had a heart attack he was on resus, then told he was being admitted, so took him out the resus bay. Then realised they didn't have a bed so he sat for three hours on a hard chair in a&e normal waiting room.
I don't think the staff are on go slow, however.

You probably can't see into resus or majors. It's probably packed in there.

It's not a joke- there is nothing funny about it. The state of A&E in this country is appalling. This government has had long enough to sort it out if they wanted to. They clearly don't.

That's because stroke national guidelines state patient must be seen and treated within the hour. He was a top priority compared with others who had been triaged.

Cases like this are exactly why others get set back too because there's more urgent matters like your husbands

How's she feeling? Hope you've been seen and had some progress.

@CanNeverThinkOfAName

There are too many staff whose entire job seems to be admin, and too few actively caring for patients.

How on earth can you actually KNOW this @NotTerfNorCis ?!

I get very frustrated reading this kind of “I know it all from sitting in front of house”. You can’t see behind the curtain, you don’t know every patient’s circumstances.

Do you not get it? You are in the front of house bit of A&E; so you will see admin staff!

That’s like saying “I am in a GP surgery and all I can see are receptionists, therefore there aren’t enough doctors..”

I hope he’s okay, that’s not an obvious one for an adult to have

I'm so sorry. My dad had effectively died at home - totally unresponsive. They did their best but called it 20 mins after he had arrived. But thinking about it this was a long time ago. I'm older than I realise 😬I hope it went better for your dad.

Having been in resus twice myself it was absolute chaos and not a person sat about on a go slow anywhere. I had to sit and wait on a chair for ages before being taken into the resus bay as i started to get worse so I got to watch everything. It was horrible and I felt sorry for them. This was 2019, so can only imagine the state of it now.

Im so glad some A&E staff have weighed in here. OP is obviously distressed, understandably so, but these type of uninformed anecdotes are so harmful to the public support our nhs needs if we are to have a hope of keeping it in any form. Privatisation would be disastrous for so many people who can't afford insurance. I hope OP's son/daughter is okay.

@ParsnipAndPoppy this is a measure of the productivity of the system though, not staff. For example, at mu local A&E when I was there a few weeks ago they couldn't see patients because they had nowhere to see them - every single space was crammed with people as there were no beds available on wards so some very unwell people were just stacking up in the waiting room until they could be admitted. Basic triage was happening but seeing a doctor and being examined properly was challenging with no space to do it in.

Quite possibly many staff are less productive but the system as a whole is the problem eg a pp's example of needing a tetanus shot which is a 2 min job but having to wait 90 mins for someone else to do it.

I think you assume doctors are just sitting in the back twiddling their thumbs. They are not. There are patients back there that don't leave, that may be being treated for hours.
The systems is flawed for sure, but it's not because they 'are not busy'.

I took my 87 yo DM to A&E with a stoke- because it had t happened in the last hour she waited over night to be seen. It was hell on earth. The nurse admitting people was seriously losing her shit. She was being vile to patients, but I'm
nit sure I would have been much nicer under the circumstances.