To say stop moaning about A&E

[Darkcarpark]

My son (21) dislocated his shoulder and I took him to A&E. They were absolutely fabulous with him, because it was an emergency! He had bloods taken, X-rays, two doctors and a nurse manipulate his shoulder back into place with morphine and a further X-ray, all in under 3 hours. So I just want to say to all the people moaning about A&E waiting times to think about whether you were a genuine accident or emergency and for anyone what has had good experiences of A&E to put a shout to the staff that are there for us in our time of need.

I think it's the luck of the draw.

Last week my Mum had an accident, ambulance to A&E, no waiting, x-ray and broken bones plastered and everything patched up. We were in and out within 4 hours, was amazing.

Last month, same hospital A&E, my sister was left lying on the waiting room floor for 4 hours after being sent for a scan. She was so ill she was admitted and ended up staying in hospital for nearly 4 weeks. She was so ill, she couldn't even sit in the chair in the waiting room.

That is absolutely horrific. I am so sorry that your DP died in such an unfair way.

That’s truly truly horrendous. I’m so sorry

I hate OP posts like this because I don’t think people have any idea how truly awful A&E care can be, and it cheapens the lives listed due to that truly awful care.

I am a paramedic and have been working in front line emergency services for the past decade, regularly working with several A&E departments.

I, too, had a good experience in our local A&E with my child. We also had a quick, efficient experience when my husband needed A&E treatment. Many of my patients have had excellent treatment in this department.

In the same hospital, I have alerted patients with life threatening conditions to the resus room and been told to wait on the ambulance because there is no space inside. I have had patients deteriorate significantly on the back of my ambulance waiting for a space inside, despite me raising serious concerns with A&E staff, and once I physically wheeled them through the doors having refused to wait any longer, go into cardiac arrest and die. The outcome for these patients may have been different if the department had had the capacity to see and treat them when they arrived at the hospital rather than some time later.

My positive experiences at this hospital are negated by the awful experiences of some of my patients. You could have two different outcomes if you turned up at the same time on two nights of the same week.

I am truly glad you had a good experience at your local A&E, but that does not mean that other people ‘moaning’ about their experiences haven’t experienced woefully inadequate care. Have some compassion.

Tell that to all the people who have died on trolleys in A&E!
Seriously op, are you so stupid to think because you have never experienced something it doesn't exist?

Why did you go to a&e with a dislocation?
Urgent care is for dislocations and fractures!

People not using the appropriate service is why there are people waiting hours/days on a&e floors and corridors.

That’s a bit rude and out of order .

Whatever you’ve experienced isn’t the fault of anyone on this post .

and its comments like this that show we just have no hope in society 🙄

I wouldn’t want to do the job these people do , day in and day out for the little pay and even less respect they get .

This is the government to blame not the people within the NHS on the frontline .

Good for you but that wasn’t the experience that I had when I had to go to A&E a few years ago when I broke my foot. I was made to feel like a nuisance from the moment I got there I was wheeled out of X-Ray and left in a corridor and that’s where the doctor told me I had broken my foot and I would need an operation the next day. I was then taken to a room only to be left sat there in a wheelchair facing the bed I found out when I went to stand up to get on the bed that the breaks hadn’t been put on the next day I was taken to get a cast put on the doctor without any warning or offering of any pain relief just grabbed my foot and realigned my broken fibia and shouted at me for screaming in pain. The physio was the one who showed me my X-rays because I’d not seen them or even been told what exactly I had even done but she only told me about my ankle. They checked to make sure that I could get about with the crutches and they had a student nurse just wheel me outside A&E and leave me there. It was only after I had the cast taken off that I found out that I broke 4 bones in my foot and my ankle.

YABU. Every single time We've been to A&E has been an emergency. The majority of experiences have been negative and several have risked DDs life. She has a congenital heart defect and has probably been blue lighted to A&E 20+ times

After her first surgery she kept turning blue and refusing to feed. In that period of time the longest between ambulance trips to A&E was 10 days. They kept fobbing me off and claiming she "just" had feeding difficulties. Wouldn't acknowledge that there is usually a reason for feeding difficulties. Wouldn't listen to me when I expressed concerns about heart failure because an inability to feed and blue spells are red flags and everybody was aware her first surgery had failed. Because DD would usually bring herself out of these episodes in the ambulance or in the A&E waiting room A&E staff point blank refused to do any form of cardiac assessment beyond her SATS. Which were always normal because she doesn't have a cyanotic heart defect so isn't meant to turn blue.

There was two incidents where the blueness didn't go away in the ambulance and DD ended up in resus. But because she eventually went pink A&E doctors fed back to the professionals around us that I was just anxious and traumatised and it's definitely feeding issues and her severe reflux. Which meant nobody else would explore why she was randomly turning blue because we were at A&E so much they understandably believed the doctors there.

Around 7 weeks post surgery we had a planned admission to hospital to fit an NG tube and train me. She was given an ECG and her heart was struggling. 8 weeks post surgery, the day she was due to be discharged she went grey and floppy while a nurse was holding her. She spent 4 weeks being stabilised in HDU before having her second emergency open heart surgery. My 15 week old baby wouldn't have gone through weeks of heart failure and suffering had A&E staff actually listened to me one one of the many many times she was rushed to A&E and admitted to a ward for "feeding issues" during the 8 weeks she was at home between surgeries.

Flash forward to a decade later. DD had really bad chest pain and went all pale. We took her to A&E. Granted she was triaged really quickly and they took it really seriously. BUT there were no beds in the paediatric assessment unit. Well no, that's not entirely accurate. There were beds but there weren't enough staff up there. No doubt due to funding. So my poor, terrified autistic 10 year old had to spend SIX HOURS in adult Majors, listening to a woman in crisis in the next cubicle scream, shout and kick the shared wall so hard it shook. Not to mention everything else going on in there. She had to cope with staff who weren't trained to work with children and who couldn't/didn't access her records so didn't know she has additional needs wouldn't listen to me explain this.

They wouldn't let me be her voice or even simplify the questions despite the fact DD becomes distressed in hospital settings when she can't understand what's going on. They wouldn't allow her to articulate what the issue was in a way she could do it. They expected her to explain it as a capable adult would. We did eventually manage to get her up to PAU but it took 6 hours.

I will complain about A&E because the very few positive/neutral experiences we've had don't erase the multiple times we've fallen victim to the shit show of medical misogyny, underfunding and understaffing combined. It was bad 10 years ago and it's even worse now.

I’m currently in A&E with my 80yo mum. She fell earlier this evening and we suspect a broken wrist. Arrived just after 10pm and finally got triaged at 00:30am. Had an X-ray and now waiting for results and next steps.

The people who work here are amazing. They have to put up with a lot of abuse and demands and I certainly couldn’t do it. They are all working as best they can with a massive workload.

The system isn’t perfect but I’m not wanting to complain as the staff are enduring a stressful job and doing their best.

Sounds like you were seen by the minor injuries team rather than A+E.

Those that drink alcohol and have injuries are no less worthy of care! And are not the issue. The issue is that there are no beds for those who require an admission so they sit in A+E and there is no space to seen anyone else. Then those oeoooe waiting on admission get sicker and require regular medications etc so new patients can’t be Treated. It’s a capacity issue.

I was very lucky when I took my 3 yo in recently too and we were seen immediately. But that doesn’t mean everyone has the same experience.

I went in with a fast AF, as a new symptom of my heart problem, ambulanced in as they were not happy to leave me home (I had tried to fix it with more beta blocker, didn't work but a good attempt anyway)...

Cutting a very long story short - I was left sat in my own piss, for almost 18 hours on an unsuitable surface (wheelchair user, needs pressure relieving seating/mattress - which they had, but in stores the other side of the site and no one on with the key), no assistance to toilet, no suitable food (diabetic, nothing appropriate and nothing with the carbs/sugar content listed), having a hypo with no way of getting help from a side room (still in A&E!) with no way to reach a call bell (not sure there even was one).

Ignored several times by nurses too busy discussing weddings and shopping, so the fact I had not had meds they thought I had had didn't register for hours, by which point the relevant cardiologist and pharmacist had gone home...

Finally after no one called my partner, he eventually showed up, to find me having a massive hypo, still sat in my own piss, and he brought my chair so after he found me some sugar (in my bag but helpfully placed where I couldn't get it!!) I could self discharge and collect my meds the following day.

The pressure sores I got from that took near 6 months to heal.

I won't be going again unless its 'you're going to die in the next five minutes unless you go' situation (which to be fair they didn't know wasn't the case last time).

Last time my sister ended up there (following heart surgery at another hospital), she was given the wrong meds, by a Dr who had absolutely not understood her immediate history or medication schedule - who then argued that he was right with her and two other drs and it took a WEEK to fix his errors, he's bloody lucky (as is she) he didn't kill her. He had to have it explained twice, the second time with her flashing her 'zipper' at him before he grasped she HAD had open heart surgery recently, he first assumed she was still waiting for it, then that she'd had it years ago! I don't think English was even his fifth or sixth language and reading comprehension non-existant + sleep deprivation and totally inadequate supervision.

This is exactly it. I was there recently with my son with a broken bone and there was a child with constipation, a person with a sore throat and a child that slipped in the playground. All sorts of other very minor issues ( after 7 hours you get to know a lot).

People love the drama of an a&e trip and also this is another example of the lack of resilience now.

A&E should only be If you are potentially dying, critically ill or you've damaged a bit that is beyond repair without medical intervention.

Lucky you. I went to an and e with chest pain and a suspected blood clot on the lung post surgery. It look an hour before they even triaged me

Was in A&E with my mum, 85 with stage 4 cancer until 3am the other day and I wondered whether the experience would kill her. It damned nearly killed me at the time. The staff were good but if there were enough of them we could have been in and out of there in an hour. I'll moan all I fucking well like.

Ill tell this to my friend who went to A&E yesterday at 6pm and is still there, not having been seen (6 AM the following day). How dare she moan!

Ah I'll tell my friend to stop moaning about her recent A&E trip where her child was forgotten about, waited to even be triaged for 5 hours before she dared speak up, to then discover her child was quite literally deathly ill - that was three weeks ago and she's still in HDU now

Or maybe I'll stop moaning about the experience my daughter just had, where because "it wasn't broken" they ignored all the major warning signs and my daughter nearly lost her foot due to compartmental syndrome - which I only returned to A-E for because two separate paramedics told me my daughter was having a medical emergency - one only saw photos of her foot to know that.

Or maybe I'll stop moaning about the time they sent my other daughter away with "it's just a bit of bruising" when she couldn't weight bare, there was swelling and instant bruising and the second opinion we sought confirmed (after doing the standard things like x-rays which our local refused to do) that not only was there a break; she'd ripped her Achilles tendon.

Do not come and tell people not to moan. The NHS is fallible, some staff are rubbish, and if we don't highlight this, there is even less chance of change than we already have. We don't need to be rude to staff or anything, but we absolutely can and should talk about our experiences

My dh sat in an A&E corridor after being triaged (as lowest category) for 9 hours.
When a doctor finally got to him, they banged an antibiotic drip up straight away.
He spent 9 days in hospital whilst they hit his sepsis with 4 different antibiotics a day. He was gravely ill.

So yeah, I will criticise A&E but moreso the people who rock up there because they can't get a GP appointment.

You were very lucky @Darkcarpark that your son was seen quickly for a non life threatening injury 🙄

The staff are usually great but we can still call out the NHS as being an utter shit show. My dad spent 9 hours waiting to be seen and yes it was an emergency due to a burst blood vessel.

you had a great experience. Send some cookies to the staff to say thank you and stop calling out the rest of us. You do you.

We have usually had good experiences with A&E when it was for minor issues such asbreaks, fractures and concussions and to be fair I don't mind the wait because there are patients with more urgent issues.

However recently we were the patient with the far more urgent issue and unfortunately on this occasion they massively dropped the ball with devasting consequences. A complaint is being compiled to ensure that the matter is addressed and appropriate retraining given so that noone else will have to go through what we did. So no, please don't tell me to stop moaning about A&E.

By the same token the OP is telling others not to moan when she has no idea of what others who have had bad experiences which is more rude and out of order.

I’m so sorry that you went through that. Honestly OP is so entitled thinking ‘well I had a good experience so everyone else must have’

people have different experiences. And not all are good.

A dislocation is an urgent injury.

Swathes of the UK have no access to a minor injuries unit or an urgent care unit and only have an A&E. Not everywhere has multiple options to get help, especially out of hours.

Here we can't get an xray if we arrive even a minute after 1pm at our local minor inquiries unit.