AIBU to question my husband's treatment in a hospital waiting room?

[SadlyNotATroll]

Posting here for traffic sorry. DH had a routine blood test on Thursday and was sent straight to hospital after some concerning numbers relating to his kidneys I think. He was there all day Thursday having tests and sent home. Was called at 10:30 on Thursday evening saying he had to go back in the next morning. I don’t want to over share his personal details on the internet but he is being treated with IV antibiotics but isn’t actually being told what for. Last night they had no beds and he slept in a chair in the clinic waiting room. I say slept but he didn’t sleep at all. Today he’s still there and being told he will be needing to stay in over the weekend but they have no beds. He has no privacy and is sat upright in a chair.

I get that the NHS is in dire straits, I really do. But how can he be treated in a waiting room chair and be expected to sleep and recover there? Do we have any recourse at all? Please don’t think this is a nurse/NHS bashing thread. The staff have been wonderful and it’s not their fault at all.

Because ‘bedblockers’ are in the main frail elderly people waiting for a care home place or for adjustments to be made to their home.

My mum - aged 94 at the time - was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. She was also in the end stages of vascular dementia. Spent two weeks on a trolley in a corridor, along with other patients who lined the walls both sides. She was hooked up to a drip, no privacy and personal hygiene and care was non existent. She couldn’t feed herself and after realising that trays of food were being taken back uneaten and no one was checking, we made sure a family member was there during meal times to feed her. It’s truly shocking. What’s worse is that a nurse friend has told us the NHS are now advertising posts for staff for ‘corridor care’.

Yes it is worth complaining. Why can’t he go to another hospital or another unit? Why can’t they tell him what he is being treated for? No point in being stoical and sitting in a chair all weekend. That why PALS is there, no?

A doctor would have prescribed the antibiotics for your husband?

In January my dad was in A&E for 3 days he finally got a bed on a ward (chronic COPD and cellulitis) died about 30 minutes after being on the ward !

Another hospital might be just the same, the heatwave has made hospitals even more stretched. PALS will not be there over the weekend, hasn't there been a senior doctors strike this week. A doctor must have seen his blood results,,prescribed the ivabs so that's really poor if no one has spoken to him about an infection.

I think this thread just proves that the state of the NHS has to be seen to be believed. We all know it's bad but it's only when we witness it first hand we realise how inadequate and shocking the care can be.
I should say there are wonderful people in the NHS doing amazing work, but it's really not fit for purpose at the moment.

Sadly I agree. Better to die sooner and more quietly at home than be subjected to an overcrowded hospital.

Most hospitals are full currently and this heatwave hasn’t helped. It would be worth asking if he could go home and sleep after the last evening dose and then come back in the morning for the next one. As far as coeliac food goes, you are better bringing your own because the hospital gluten free options are generally pretty dreadful anyway.

I am increasingly of the view that it makes sense to own a comfortable wheelchair that you can take with you so you avoid uncomfortable waiting room chairs if you're somebody who ends up in A&E a lot.

May be worth him asking for repeated blood tests - if the initial antibiotics are working maybe he's out of the risky zone enough to go home overnight and come in just for antibiotics.

Another option depending on the heat level might be him sleeping in the car in the hospital carpark if he doesn't want to be too far away.

This is just the start of the cuts. We have had emergency meetings in my trust last week saying we need to somehow claw back an overspend of almost £10 million. More services have been cut and people’s jobs are being consulted on. We are losing anything viewed as vaguely ‘non-essential’.

But they are essential eg IT, and I for the first time in my life, wondered shall I stop working in the NHS and go private. I’m 55 and never thought that idea would enter my head.

OP, further to my original post, people are right that you could ask about possible treatment by a hospital at home team or a transfer somewhere else that does have beds. I should have pointed those things out too, but honestly I just assumed that both options are also overwhelmed right now, or the staff would be suggesting it to you.

It really is this bad. I don’t know why some people don’t believe it (these are possibly the same people who think climate change isn’t a thing despite it being right in front of our eyes…). I’ve been a junior doctor coming to see a patient 12 hours after admission to explain what’s going on, because there simply wasn’t time earlier and I might have been eg. in resus or whatever. And that was back in the 2000s when the NHS was significantly less pressured. So it’s very believable, although back then, the patient would definitely have been made aware of what the admitting team thought was going on and the reason for starting any treatments etc at the time of admission. Of course many people are so unwell at that stage they don’t have a good grasp of what’s been said or who they’ve seen etc.

People are seriously underestimating the impact of this heatwave in the red weather warning areas at least on the local NHS infrastructure I think. We are just in perma-crisis these days in the NHS (much like the country as a whole really), with no give in the system to ramp things up when there is extra demand for any reason and this is the outcome. Its awful.

Sadly, the NHS is truly broken. I was taken to a&e with a heart problem. I spent the night in the waiting room eventually sleeping across three chairs. A nice man found me a pillow. They told me not to go home in case I had a heart attack. The following morning when the doctor said they had no idea how long I would be there, I booked a private cardiology appointment and went home to bed. They did some observations when I arrived, decided I needed to stay, but there was no care offered at all.

I’m a little younger than you but less than a decade. I’m a GP. I also thought I’d never leave the NHS but am increasingly looking at other options. Because as people have rightly said, the staff are all doing their best but it’s a failing system as a whole, and we have all been bending over backwards for many years now to try to hold the cracks together, and it’s exhausting and demoralising. And perversely it also allows the people in charge to pretend all is well when we don’t allow the cracks to show to people who don’t know how to look for them, until there is a crisis like this and they can’t help but not only appear but be extremely visible.

This is why I can’t wait until we start doing the European model. NHS is not fit for purpose

That's what we are being encouraged to think. (That the NHS is cooked) .

Ask yourself why??

A. Whilst 30% denied claims quarterly 16 Billion dollar profit US private healthcare firms circle our politicians ...chuck them a few thousand and lobby to take on the easy bits of our NHS at VASTLY elevated prices.

Tech firms promise shiny new computer programmes will do the work of carers and nurses and is worth the hundreds of millions spent....meanwhile patients suffer.

See also specialist children's care homes making hundreds of millions providing appslling care to our vulnerable children.

We need to choose politicians who aren't accepting the lobby

So many research studies show how much the NHS achieves on so little.. 💙

This
Does he not have a tongue in his head?
So instead if putting on big boys pants and using his words, OP has decided to bash nurses.

You mean fair taxes, funded services. Payments for GP services etc..Which party is offering this?

Great news, he has been given a bed on a different ward and allowed home to shower/eat/see kids for 2 hours. They said he if isn’t back by 8pm they will call the police which seems a bit extreme but he’s just happy he’ll have somewhere to rest his head and recover.

You’re demented if you think I’ve bashed nurses. On the contrary. Go back and read all my posts. The staff have been wonderful.

The blood test results are likely to be on the NHS App too ...to give further information

That’s great news!
im really happy for him (and you)

I hope he’ll recover quickly!

It’s easy to say this when you are not in unbearable pain.

i’m not dying (i hope) but I am disabled and when I get ill I really get ill. I do try to stay away from hospitals these days but in all honesty when you are in so much pain you just don’t know what to do and are desperate for someone anyone to help it’s not so easy then to make the choice to stay away.

The problem with the NHS app is that you get raw numbers. Up to the patient to interpret it via goggle or AI.

In some ways, esp if there is something serious going on, it’s a really crappy way to find out what’s going on.

I wonder why our once so wonderful NHS is now a neglectful overcrowded swamp?