To think some things should just be turned away from A&E?

[ifallinlove]

I saw a channel 4 video about a day in a&e during the heatwave.

The first guy seen was a bloke who had decided to walk across hot tarmac to get food while at the beach and now had burns on the bottom of his feet.

He said he had “forgotten to get shoes”. I’m sorry but it’s been 35 degrees for at least two weeks now. There is no way on earth that you “forget” to put shoes on. He made the decision to do it and now sought emergency care.

AIBU to say things like this should be redirected to minor injuries and the appropriate referrals made from there? It’s his own stupidity taking up a bed in a&e!

The ambulance that took me in didn't equal priority! I still waited for 8 hours with a crp of 294 they discovered after finally taking my blood while I'd been sitting there like a balloon hallucinating!
Everything moved incredibly quickly after that but it was a very long scary wait

A few months ago I got bitten by my cat . Called my GP to enquire about a tetanus injection to be told that our huge practice doesn’t do them anymore and I’d have to go to A and E ! Felt a total fraud sitting there for 5 hours to be triaged before I could be directed to the minor injuries unit inside A and E where the wait was quite short . Couldn’t understand why I had to be in actual A and E when I was only there for a quick tetanus jab and surely a triage on the door or when I gave the reception the reason I was there would have saved everyone’s time. Was embarrassed sitting in A and E making small talk with genuine emergencies .

It makes me laugh how many people are sure that half of the patients in A&E don’t need to be there and could have just gone to a pharmacy/taken a paracetamol.

I know whenever I’ve been to A&E I don’t have a clue what other people are there with. I don’t go round interrogating them for their symptoms and pre-existing conditions.

Same.
Although one time when I was in the waiting room, a lady approached the desk and I did overhear her say she was there because she could not get a GP appointment. She had niggling ankle pain.
And I expect she then moaned that she spent half the day there before getting seen.

I was in A+E with my ex wife and a guy stepped up to the reception and said that he had been their 5 hours and he was ded up waiting so was going home. She asked him what he was waiting to be seen for and he replied "a fly bite on my nose"

No thats what triage is for and they should be more brutal. Problem is nobody can get a GP appt so they turn up in A+E. Solve primary care problem.

Don't blame the individuals, blame the system. Minor injuries centres aren't everywhere and its not necessarily easy to get in. 111 being staffed by non clinical staff means a lot of people sent to a&e who dont need to be there. Its a problem with many complex factors.

Do you have any medical background to be suggesting that triage should be more brutal.

The largest one being gaps in social care meaning that freeing up beds further up the hospital is difficult and more staffing time and bed space is being taken up by patients who need admitting but are still in ED when they shouldn’t be. And the GP crisis.

So are lots of accidents. Lack of thought/care etc. can't just leave them untreated. Very bad idea.

This too. Gaps caused partially by chronic underfunding and ill thought out policies

Yep, this.
My best friend's mum was taken by ambulance to A&E recently after having a seizure (and she waited several hours for that). She was sat in the ambulance outside A&E for 5 hours before she got through the door, then spent hours on a trolley in a corridor before she even saw a doctor.

When did waiting in an ambulance for hours outside A&E become normal?

I’ve watched regular Day in A&E on channel 4, non heat wave edition. Like almost all A&Es, roughly 50% of cases, even the most serious, are human error.

Trampolines alone account for quite a lot of A&E visits. Perhaps they should turn away children who use trampolines 🤔

Yep, the X-ray department in the children' hospital I worked in had posters up about the dangers of trampolines.

Part of it is
stulidity part of it is the system. Me and partner had an accident abroad (cost covered all good) and needed nothing but stitches
pulled after. We had to go to a&e despite it being a simple thing. They decided to keep me and take bloods )never found out why, never got results). Put me into day surgery (despite not needing it, but had to wait for hours until finding out they wasted my time). All I wanted was a gp appointment for someone to take out slightly more tricky stitches. While we were there, people showed with paper cuts, shampoo in their eyes and other nonsense wasting people’s time. I never wanted to be there in the first place, took a whole day and if the stitches
had been more straight forward, I’d have taken them
out myself.

I think people who have no compassion for others and their predicaments should be triaged and turned away at the door.

My partner went to A&E with constipation. By the next morning he was having life saving surgery and went to ICU. He'd had undiagnosed bowel cancer. Ended up with a stoma.
My Mother danced around the bed with the nurse, the day she died. We'd gone through A&E that morning. I could give lots of examples. I came off a 12 hour shift and suddenly couldn't breathe, but picked up in the hospital. The doctor was shocked at my bloods.
When my partner was in and out, over not being diagnosed with his heart issues, I'd get us a meal deal and a few newspapers. He was seriously ill, but laughing and eating. You can't tell by looking at people, as anyone who has visited people in hospices/Marie Currie, will know.

They are so fucking dangerous! It’s absolutely wild. There was a doctor doing his little “personal sharing for human interest” bit on one of those shows and he said his daughters were never getting a trampoline or going horseback riding (it was an episode where a girl got a hole kicked through her leg while horseback riding)

The therapist I used to see took a load of time off to look after her teen daughter who had her face literally kicked off by her own horse. She had tons of surgery.
Horses scare me anyway. My aunt had them, and one went past me, and kicked her back leg out inches from my face.

I think trampolines have to be sold with the big guard things around them now, because kids were launching themselves off them. I don't know the figures, but I wonder if A&E admissions for trampoline related injuries has gone down since then.

On 3/4/2026 I went to A&E as I was in agony and couldn’t urinate due to a 1.8cm kidney stone which had caused my kidney to swell up. Spent all night sitting in A&E and after around 14 hours I was admitted for surgery and had a double J stent placed in my urethra. They couldn’t remove the stone as I had an infection and was at risk of sepsis, so I am due to go back and have surgery to remove the stent and kidney stone and have a new temporary stent placed in again. I was booked in for surgery on Friday 10/7/2026, over 3 months after having the stent placed inside the urethra. I spent all day in the day case surgery unit, wearing the surgery gown and at sometime after 5pm I was told the surgery was cancelled as they had ran out of time. During that afternoon the fire alarm had gone off at the hospital and I spent more than an hour in a distressed state due to having flashbacks from the time I was in a house fire (9 years ago, when my husband ran in to a burning building and saved my life by carrying my unconscious body in his arms and jumping out of the upstairs window, but we both ended up in ICU as we both suffered injuries when we hit the ground - he had a brain haemorrhage and he died from sepsis caught in ICU).

They said I will just have to go back in on another day and have stent replaced, as well as removing the stone, but they have no idea how hard it is for me to go to hospital and seek treatment, as I have severe anxiety, PTSD, mental health issues (and other health problems including Epilspsy). Maybe it’s just because I’m autistic, but I have to mentally prepare myself for leaving the house and I dont go to the hospital unless I am in agony.

I got sent to Miu from ED, they didn't have facilities to test me properly, subsequently developed sepsis and GP sent me to admissions after 2 visits where I spent 3 weeks in hospital..

Because someone looks ok, doesn't mean they are.

I was ready to agree but burns probably is an A and E. It would probably be a minor injuries unit if there was one but not many people think to do that. I don’t think people should be turned away because they did something silly as a lot of accidents would have been caused that way. However I do think people should be turned away who come in and say ‘I’ve had this cough for 2 weeks and it’s not going away’ which I’ve very much heard someone say when I was there.

I know a woman who goes to ED at the drop of a hat, literally every time her kids have a minor injury. She must've been 10 times in the last 18 months. There's never been anything seriously wrong but she always wants them check out just in case.

Most recently her daughter hurt her foot dancing so the Mum wanted her x-rayed, went to the local MIU to find out they now don't do walk-ins and they offered her an appointment which was later that day but inconvenient as they were going out that evening so she drove to the next town to go to ED straight away, waited a few hours, got seen and sent home with a diagnosis of soft-tissue injury and she then spent days complaining about the NHS not being convenient enough for her when she didn't need to use MIU or ED in the first place.

Agree. What about people who self harm? They are literally doing it to themselves? Should they be left to bleed?

I used to be a microbiologist in the NHS working Pathology for 9 years with a degree in Biomedical sciencem let me know if that works for you