To think the current A&E wait times are mad

[Iamunsure]

I live in west Midlands and the current wait times in our area's A&E is currently 9 hours to be seen for general and 6-7 hours for children A&E. We took our DC to A&E as asked by 111 triage. It's absolutely mad with people sitting on floor for hours to be seen.
How are the waiting times in your area and how's your experience been. I think it's absolutely mad and gone massively downhill for NHS.

Reference poster malonemeadow your comment re my bizarre love for nhs rude. Just sticking up for an institution that has done a lot for me and family throughout various illnesses and am incredibly grateful we have the nhs in this country.
Also your initial post didn't say your dd had tonsillitis. We had part of the story.

A customer of mine who is an elderly lady relying on a shopping trolley/ walker mentioned she used to walk with a stick before her accident. Asked her what had happened and she advised she had been pushed over at a pedestrian crossing. She landed on her bottom. She was in a lot of pain so was taken to hospital and waited for 9 hours in A & E. In the end she couldn't cope and caught the last bus home. She was in desperate pain for 18 months, put down to sciatica but pain killers did no good. Eventually she was found to have suffered 2 untreated back fractures..this has resulted in limited mobility and a lot of chronic pain.
Yes it was her fault for leaving hospital untreated and unseen but she is an old lady and couldn't cope any longer bless her.
Her pain and discomfort could and should have been avoided.
Unless it's a life threatening issue the system is absolutely broken.

We all agree that healthcare in this country is pants, and that shortfalls in one area (e.g. lack of gps) causes problems in other areas. Why aren't other countries' health services in such as mess? Or are they? What are they doing that is so different to us?
I know that not everything is free, but how do they collect money without it being self defeating? It costs money to collect money, so any payments would have to be more than token amounts. And what do they do that could we apply to our health system to make it work better?
I cannot see that the problems we have of an aging population and immigration etc etc being much different in European countries at least, can someone enlighten me?

Totally agree some people do take the mickey & go to A&E for minor problems, but you can't tell by looking.

Yesterday I was sent to A&E because I'm pregnant & I collapsed. I was absolutely fine, tried GP & midwife, who sent me to 111, who sent me to urgent care, who sent me to A&E. was happily sitting there snacking, knitting, chatting etc. I'm sure it looked like I didn't need to be there.
I also didn't want to be there as felt fine & felt awful for taking up resources, but I'd been sent. So you can't tell by looking who should & shouldn't be there. But 100% agree, some people go for minor things & should be at GP.

I had 13 hours with an infected gallbladder. After I almost passed out, they started sending out a man to shoot liquid morphine into my mouth.

Your attitude re: the NHS is part of the problem. People treat it as some sort of sacred cow that is immune to criticism and get offended when anybody dares to talk about the many serious issues it has. Patient care and safety is being seriously compromised and it needs to be addressed and spoken about

@anonhop oh god I know. I was more talking from statistics and reports about how many go for stuff that's better dealt with elsewhere. I was also thinking of one specific person who was so annoying, harassing staff moaning about the wait, and healthy looking, young, while all around were grey, collapsed, sobbing, vomming into sick bowls, unconscious, bleeding etc. I should not judge. I was in resus last time and there was a lady with half her face fallen off staggering about begging for meds. They treat everyone badly.

Well, so many visits to A&E are inappropriate or unnecessary, so it's hardly surprising.
Heard about a person in a minor car accident the other day who went to A&E for cuts and bruises - I mean, where is people's common sense? Yes, they'd had an accident, but what exactly did they expect A&E to do, apart from send them home? Which is exactly what happened!

Judging from my GP- impossible to get an appointment. No option?

The amount of people who were in A and E at my last visit because they had a cough despite being well enough to talk outside frequently to SMOKE was infuriating.

There should be a quicker triage where staff are given more autonomy to send people away.

Like the guy who had a sore finger after doing DIY that morning!

Does Sweden have a similar healthcare system to us?

Last time I was in A&E, it took me 18 hours to get a bed. Our local hospital has turned the waiting room into a sitting A&E room. Nurses come out, do your obs etc and will give you painkillers if you need them but otherwise you’re sat in a chair unless the doctor calls you into a room to do the examination. But yeah 18 hours….

It depends what you go in with . I’ve been in A&E twice in the last 3 months with my daughter ( adult ) , first time with shortness of breath and we were seen ECG , chest X-ray and out in 3 hours and the second time with urine retention and she was catheterised / de catheterised ( her choice) and out in a couple of hours . On both occasions people were coming in and being referred to the GP and being told it was several hours wait .

There are three issues, none of which are the patients’ fault (or the A&E staff’s fault):

Collapse of social care - this means that patients who are fit to be discharged experience long delays waiting for a package of care or nursing home placement. This means beds are not freed up for patients in A&E. This is what is leading to longer trolley waits.

Backlogs of care due to Covid - there has been a massive increase in work to try to clear this, again leading to fewer beds available for people in A&E, and also sicker patients in the community (who wouldn’t have been this sick if they’d had their heart failure or diabetic foot treatment in 2020) requiring more frequent admission via A&E.

Collapse of GP services - people really do attend A&E because they can’t see their GP. Sometimes that is reasonable (ie if their condition worsens), sometimes it isn’t. The majority of those patients will be seen in minors, which is generally a different workstream to majors, so those patients don’t influence the patients on trolleys.

All of this could be fixed with more beds and more staff, but the Tories would rather give their cash to people like Frank Hester.

My dad went to a and e a couple of weeks ago having hit his thumb with an axe. He was in X rayed, vaccinated, dressed, given antibiotics and back home in an hour.

Some shocking times! I feel so fortunate that our local hospital wasnt anything like that, 20 mins for triage nurse, 1 hour for dr expected wait time, admittedly it was early and quiet on sunday morning and definitely was filling rapidly as the morning went on!

Patients who turn up at A&E are triaged. The most critical are seen first and that’s how it should be.

If a patient can walk out of A&E because they CBA to wait any longer then they shouldn’t have been in A&E in the first place 🤷‍♀️

Reference malonemeadow's last comment to me.
I am not part of the problem as you wrongly put it. What a cheek and how rude to say that.
I am fully aware that the nhs has big problems that need sorting quickly.
My original thread if you had taken the time to read properly was just explaining some of the problems from a different viewpoint. I have alot of friends and relatives who work for tthe nhs so hear things from them.
No one minds 'constructive' criticism about the situation and it is needed as you rightly said. All I was trying to get across is some patients (not all) abuse the system and staff and it doesn't help things to improve.
You seemed to get uptight because I defended GPs saying they can't do right from wrong. No one was having a personal attack at you and your dd and their tonsillitis condition but you have got very rattled for some reason?
We are allowed to have views that are different to you without getting insulted or posters being snidey.
I was trying to explain abit about what it's like for some of the nurses as we do seem to get a lot of threads about how bad the nhs is and how long the A /E waits are so was just trying to give background on what things staff do that some of the public don't realise.
Believe me as I am currently a nhs pt and also got relatives working in it I know how much help is needed to improve things.
But I will put this back on you rather than me as you said earlier i was part of the problem! Why am I part of the problem explaining what the staff do.
You are a big part of the problem as not interested in looking at the full picture.
I haven't got some weird infatuation with the nhs either as you so nicely put it
Just a patient there every week seeing how hard the staff work.

Yes it does. We get billed a token amount but otherwise it's very similar. I think the A&E change is around £20.

This is the timeline I had getting dd seen for something that need antibiotics, a repeated issue she has that is clearly seen and flares up really fast but is the major if she gets medication.
-8am rung GP, no appts told to ring 111
-rung 111, 111 gave me an appt at my Gp who’d said they were too busy (spoke to call handler and clinical staff)
-patient liaison manager called from Gp, half hour later- does dd need an appt
-doc ring, asked to bring dd in
-doc2 saw dd and prescribed at 6pm,

So I spoke to 6 people to repeatedly clearly explain the obvious medical reason she had over and over.
Firstly it if was me I’d not have been capable of going through it all, I’d have been too ill. Or if I didn’t speak English etc I’d give up and go to A&E. I had to be so persistent with recorded messages and people trying to get me to go away. It takes resilience.
Secondly, dd has deteriorated over the day. I should have just gone to A&E as we’d have had a chance of starting the medicine sooner. She ended up not getting medicine for 14 hours (needed out of hours pharmacy trip) and staying overnight in hospital
Thirdly, can it really be efficient I speak to 5 people? Receptionist, patient manager for Gp call handler, doc for 111, doc for telephone appt, doc in face to face appt? It’s far far more time than talking to the one doctor. The system seemed mad. All that to get one of the appts that they apparently reserve for 111? Some common sense would have said just see the person we know we’ll be seeing anyway. Maybe just put a flag on peoples notes if they have a particular issue?

Sorry but with my daughter who had a life threatening condition she was seen straight away. If you can wait 100 hours it’s not life threatening

I had a recent experience of a&e. Interesting god forsaken place. Absolutely stunk. From the smell of weed/cigarettes that drifted inside from the entranceway ( why can't they had dedicated smoking zones rather than just accepting folk smoking at the door.
Someone vomitted but there was no staff to clean it up, so a hospital blanket was thrown over the offending puke and left to stagnate all day.
Then there was the lad sitting next to me eating an egg sandwich.
And the police turned up, sad, carnage, road traffic accident.

I was there 12 hours before I was admitted to the emergency surgical ward, however it didn't feel that long. I was called and triaged, then sent back out, then called again to get assessed by an AMP, then sent somewhere else for bloods, then a scan, then called back in to see the surgeon eventually.

So I met a lot of folk, lovely, resorting and overworked, at different parts of the day, which helped pass the time. But I will do everything in my power to avoid going back to that hellhole again.

That’s silly. Something non-life threatening can become life threatening if you wait long enough. It can be urgent to prevent deterioration. A mild asthma attack can progress, an infection in the tonsils can become sepsis or a deep tissue infection, a broken bone can become septic or become something that requires an operation instead of manipulation. It’s not a black and white situation.
For example a child with a feeding tube can have an easily treatable local infection at the entry point that if left without care can quickly travel into a major infection that’s hard to treat.
Theres this silly idea that GP= I can wait 2 week and A&E= life threatening. Care needs to include a middle ground for urgent, but not an emergency.

I really don’t think people think that. What they do see is the horrific waiting times and, sometimes, when you’ve not slept and you’re worried about your child or relative and you just want some answers or some help, it’s the staff that get the flack. It shouldn’t be, but equally, who else do those patients turn to? There’s a lack of early intervention (gp appointments, referral waiting lists etc) and people with serious symptoms being told to wait for over a year. My relative just got told by one doctor that they don’t know what’s wrong, so that’s it, discharged. Luckily they have a good GP monitoring them, but there are a lot of very obvious signs something is very wrong. That relative now has to go private. They’ve been very patient and understanding, but when people are put through symptoms that take your ability to live life away and literally cannot access help after years and years of trying, there will be short fuses.

Equally, some staff can be quite tricky. I was once yelled at by a GP receptionist when my son’s urine culture results were three weeks late and he was risking another hospital admission - turned out they were in the wrong folder on the computer and yes, he needed a different antibiotic. A urine culture takes 3 days and she accused me of ‘wasting their time’. I had to phone the lab to find out it had been sent and was in the wrong folder. In reality, no one is perfect and the current way the system works is rubbish.

If we’re going to talk about staff doing their best, we also need to talk about patients and patients’ families doing their best.

The fault belongs to neither the patients nor the staff broadly. I don’t think either the patients or the staff broadly blame each other. It’s the Government and their fun narrative about no money for anyone (except them).

It's not just the NHS the whole country is falling apart,housing,roads, education, policing,and you want to try Scotland for nutty SNP policies they unfortunately never cease to amaze.