5hr Wait to see a Dr with sick child - how are we at this point

[IAmADancer]

Just that really. Called 111 as my DD is poorly, very high temp, vomiting, lethargic, can’t put chin to her neck as it hurts. Was told she had to attend A&E.

She is currently sat on a plastic chair, looking horrendously pale and feeling so unwell. Seen the nurse and been told it’s a 5 hr wait for a dr.

Why do we accept this as the norm, it’s awful. I feel so frustrated that this is the best we can expect and that a small child who is obviously poorly is left to wait this long

I feel for you... I had worse though very recently. I was sent to A+E by my GP and had to sit in severe pain for TWELVE hours (5pm to 5am) before I was finally seen by a junior doctor who only went through my blood tests and decided follow up was best done through 'care in the community'. I saw what they call the 'corridor care' as every part of every corridor was lined with beds (and patients in them obviously). When you're in pain and anxious because your GP says you need tests only done in hospital, and possibly imaging, spending the entire night doubled up in a crowded and overheated A+E room with vomiting patients feels like some sort of divine punishment. I hope your DD feels better soon and that it's nothing serious. My experience was truly shocking.

Meningitis does not always present with all symptoms and, as the OP posted, is easily missed, as it was by the GP with one of my family members. (And although their neck was very painful, they could move it. They ended up being hospitalised for 3 months and, once sent home, needed several months of nursing care and lived with life long side effects of the illness and treatment.)

I hope your child gets seen soon, OP, and their condition improves.

I hope @IAmADancer daughter has been seen by now.

The population has increased by around 6.7 million people since then. There hasn’t been a corresponding increase in the number of health care workers and hospital capacity.

I totally agree with this too.
It has been ground down by over a decade of cuts. When Blair got in, I remember the NHS being fairly run down anfter the previous Tory governments and Labour investing massively in the NHS - hence it feeling better in 2010 as austerity hadn't hit.

It will be cut back under a Tory/ Reform gov. THat is because their fundamental belief is reduced state control - which is a direct outcome of lower taxes and that's their key stone policy along with stopping boats.

I feel like Labour will make some improvements in the next 4 years.
As they're committed to it 100% as it's theirs to begin with.

i have a number of friends with cancer who have had good prompt wonderful treatment too - there are many many good things about it still.

Exactly this, I just hope everyone on these types of threads realises what they voted for over the last 30 years. This is everyones choice apparently.

Morning all

After speaking with the nurse at 1am this morning, we were advised we wouldn’t see a doctor before 6am.The paeds A&E only had two beds in it and the main A&E beds were also full.

There were quite clearly a couple of people there that needed to be there but there were quite a few that I really questioned why they were there and I was trying very hard not to be judgemental. There were quite a few people in and out of A&E, chatting, having a coffee, kids with iPhones watching telly even though they were ‘ill’. Then you have my DD and a couple of other children who were clearly unwell but asleep on plastic chairs. There was also on man clearly having a mental health crisis who was walking around in just his pants. He had to have two nurses with him at all times as he was wandering around and trying to go into the bays.

The nurse checked her again but because her temp had gone down, they were quite dismissive. It seems that even with the other symptoms they weren’t really taking that onboard. We decided to take her home rather than have her sleep on a chair and feel worse. She’s still very poorly but our local GP is very good and I am going to get her there to see them today and then go from there.

I know it’s. It the nurses or the dr’s fault, they are in an impossible situation. I think as a society we don’t take responsibility for ourselves and our health and expect the NHS to fix it for us. I think there needs to be more urgent care centres that are open longer, social care needs a massive overhaul as well as educating people that we are now living longer and how to live longer healthier.

I don’t want to get into the semantics of whether or not we should have taken her to A&E last night. She had symptoms that could have been meningitis and I thought it best to take her. As I said previously, not a decision I take lightly knowing how bad A&E can be but nonetheless I was shocked last night at what I saw.

Well you wouldnt know that tbf,when my the 16 had a medical emergency 3 years ago he went straight through to resus ,it was a lifexand and death situation so there was no messing around waiting to be triaged .

How naive is this? You think 20 years of asset stripping and running down of the NHS can be solved in 18 months?

Lets hear how...

Partly because GPs were more freely available then. Our A&E gets clogged up with people saying they can’t get a GP appointment and know that, no long how long they wait, a doctor will see them at A&E.

The whole thing is a shambles and needs reform/. 🙄

They were ill for at least a week before being hospitalised. They did not have a fever that entire time (if at all). Yes, they did sleep in that time. And eat and drink. And hold conversations.

I don't see where the OP has written that their child is "soundly asleep". She simply said her child was asleep on a chair which, I'm imagining is partly due to exhaustion at her condition. I also imagine it's a constantly interrupted doze rather than the sound sleep you imagine.

Children's health can deteriorate rapidly and illness can appear to come out of nowhere. It makes sense to rule out the most serious conditions which require immediate treatment.

Spot the NHS employee about to have a breakdown 😬

My friend works in paeds A&E and they do often get people bringing in their DC for viruses and colds and other non urgent ailments when they don't need to, partly because they can't get to see their GP, or 111 has told them to, or there's no minor injuries unit nearby so they go to A&E instead. It's not unusual for there to be a 8-10 hour wait.

But there's often only one Dr on shift, usually starting with a backlog from the previous shift, they don't just see a patient and that's it, they often have to ensure that patient has a bed to go to, that the hospital Drs know what's happening with that patient so they can take on their care safely which often means a briefing, etc.

My son couldn't stop vomiting recently and we called 111, were told we needed medical attention and a Dr would call us back, 12 hours later they texted to say sorry we can't call you back we're too busy, see your GP. By then his vomiting had slowed and he was ok so we didn't need to see Dr after all. There must be loads of cases like this that correct themselves but people are sent to out of hours or A&E just in case.

Sorry to hear your DD didn't get seen but good to hear she didn't/hasn't deteriorated.

Hope you get the GP appointment.

But do have a low threshold to head back to a/e if she develops non-blanching spots, worsening headache even with pain relief/neck pain, +/- repeated vomitting.

Hope you get some answers today OP and that your dd feels better,

I think a lack of funding in all areas of the NHS pushes far too many people to A&E. Lots of people use it because they can’t get a GP appointment. Many minor ailments don’t need A&E, it’s like people don’t know how to deal with minor illness without seeing a dr anymore.

Yes, before awaking in pain I was sleeping very deeply (after a few days of headache and earache); very shortly after waking from pain in the middle of the night (and vomiting) I fell ‘asleep’ again. I literally lay down carefully on the floor and went to sleep.

In the brief gap between these ‘sound sleeps’ I called an ambulance which arrived very promptly, since I was not in the UK. This is why I am alive.

I then spent several days ‘sleeping’ soundly in ICU.

Falling into what appears to be a sound sleep after a short period of vomiting and pain is entirely consistent with meningitis. People need to know this.

I am deeply concerned by posters in this thread (not just the one I have quoted) minimising meningitis symptoms and even more concerned by the possibility that these posters may play some sort of role in the NHS. I sincerely hope they do not.

Had I been treated by people this ignorant, no doubt I would have been left to sleep, and never awoken.

Meningitis kills so quickly and tragically. It is awful to think that these attitudes may be playing out in the NHS, causing such suffering to so many families.

Yep - the Lansley reforms were a hammer blow. He thought that putting GPs at the heart of commissioning would mean the right local decisions were made - it just made the job of a GP impossible and many left, many also went part-time to turn a 100-hour week into a 50-hour one.

Because there are x doctors based there and there’s children more poorly than yours. Perhaps a road traffic accident involving 2 children and each needs multiple medical professionals to save their lives. Yes it seems long but if you have been triaged as can wait they will be seeing you in order of all the other children who have the same priority level. I’ve sat with dd for hours in a&e with her blacking out but because she was stable they dealt with dc who were not stable.

Whenever I have attended a+e with my children we haven't even sat in the waiting room 95% of the time, if your child is actually an emergency you would be waved straight through after triage. Our son has asthma and we have attended many many times with breathing difficulties, they are very quick and we always go straight from triage into a cubical to be seen by a doctor immediately and then sometimes moved to HDU.

Granted 5 hours is a long wait but you have been triaged, I'm sure if they were very concerned you wouldn't be waiting at all. If you feel she is getting worse you can tell them and they will bump you up the queue.

FFS you cannot tell from looking at someone who needs to be there and who doesn't!

Both my son and I are the kind of people who just keep smiling through whatever we are dealing with. We don't do being dramatic when ill so it's easy for people to underestimate how ill we are from a casual observation.

When my son was tiny I was absolutely blindsided when he went from a&e to the ward and then rapidly from there to high dependency because he had been chatting away and playing with toys. Thankfully the doctors rely on looking at blood oxygen levels not deciding on the severity of illness based on whether or not he was playing or sleeping.

Of course you were right to take your child based on their symptoms but that doesn't mean you get to decide who should and should not have been in that waiting room based on that your casual observations

@FreedomForProfiteroles i also have concerns around posters that are minimising symptoms without an real understanding of meningitis and how it can present.

To clarify she was not soundly asleep on a chair. She was very unwell and was struggling to stay awake and had been sleeping most of the day. When I had tired to wake her up earlier on she had started saying odd things that made no sense and she was also extremely agitated and was unsteady on her feet. I am not going to spend the entire thread justifying why I took her to A&E and I am also amazed at the nitpicking of her symptoms. She is 10 and was very very unwell. Just because they took her heart rate and it was normal doesn’t mean anything to be honest. There was a small child with blood pouring out of his nose, who was also clearly unwell but I’m sure his obs were also fine but he had to sit on a plastic chair also crying in pain. Obs don’t mean shit, let’s be honest here.
One of my closet friends had meningitis and it was only because his father was a GP that he realised the symptoms he was displaying were a sign of meningitis. Also different strains of meningitis present differently.

I have my own experience of A&E and being told I was fine because my ‘obs’ we ok. Turned out I needed emergency surgery or I could have died but my heart rate and temp were fine, yet still had a life threatening illness.

The problem is that there is no “non A&E” option out of hours in huge swathes of the country. When I lived in London I had a GP practice which opened early/ late and operated a walk in clinic daily and was ope at weekends, access to an urgent care center, a minor injuries unit, an A&E dept and a 24 hour GP led hospital service - all within a 10 minute walk of my house. The local 111 service was also excellent.

Where I am now, I have “extended hours” GP at my practice (finishes at 7), which is 5 mins away but only open weekdays. A&E is a 15 minute drive- and does have a GP service but have to be referred by 111 (which is crap). The closest minor injuries unit/ out of hours urgent care option is a 40 minute drive opens limited hours.

Not everything neatly falls into the bucket of “will be dead in an hour if not seen” or “fine to wait for 3-5 working days”. A huge amount of acute illness/ injury is somewhere in the middle- and for people who aren’t medics (most of us) we will always err on the conservative side especially where our kids are concerned. It’s human nature. And also - knowing that EVEN in a sick child isn’t likely to be seen quickly- it makes you tolerance lower, because you seethe direction the illness seems to be going, you factor in the inevitable wait- and you go in sooner.

I have a huge amount of sympathy and empathy for NHS workers- and I love the NHS and everything it stands for. None of my feeling about what’s not working, is about frontline staff, or individual services. But at a govt level, how we think about healthcare delivery in this country works- and start thinking about pathways to care that actually fit the needs of modern society. And I think that means more walk in clinics & urgent care centers, a return to cottage/ community hospitals for elderly patients who can be released out of acute medical settings but aren’t ready to go home etc.

Yes these things cost in the short term, but suspect longer term would save an awful lot directly and indirectly.