Are there any A and E / hospital staff here? What are hospitals actually like at the moment?

[Bagelsandbrie]

So lockdown is easing and we are being led to believe that cases are dropping etc. Is that actually the experience of those on the frontline? We don’t seem to hear any actual stories of those working in the midst of things at the moment. I have no agenda or angle about this at all I’m literally just being nosey.

The cases in Florida got me thinking about this. They’ve gone nuts but I wondered if there was still the same huge amount of hospitalisations per increase in cases or whether somehow the virus is becoming weaker..?!

Interested to hear experiences.

@felixowl I've never heard of security being an issue. Different practices use different tools which have had to follow NHS information governance policy but they all pretty much generate an email which is picked up by the practice and responded to. Did the person who said that actually work in primary care?

Covid admissions sank to basically zero a few weeks ago.i agree with previous poster, March, April, May were crazy months, June pretty weird, July is almost back to normal. Ed numbers are rising but not back to previous high. With everybody in masks and 14 days isolation pre procedure it's still very different. I think your chances of catching Covid in hospital are much,much lower than 6 weeks ago.

Fewer outbreaks in hospital than schools.

Arnoldthecat do you think its acceptable to come to an EMERGENCY department with a problem that's been going on for 3 months?!
If you've had the problem for so long it's very unlikely to be anything urgent like a bowel obstruction or an appendicitis! But there are no real diagnostics in a GPs surgery if you are granted an audience. No imagining equipment, just the GPs experience and their assessment based on the conversation and the limited diagnostics available to them. Clearly something like a bowel obstruction or appendicitis is a serious problem that requires immediate attention .I had a GP dismiss clear signs of appendicitis of an adult family member and she was left in pain for two days before the GP almost grudgingly arranged for her to be admitted. All day she waited for a bed manager to ring and they didnt. She rang the hospital late afternoon and was treated like an inconvenience, they put her in an all male ward late that night, did a keyhole appendectomy and turned her out the following day with zero aftercare plan.

Clearly abdom pain could be a multitude of things. People could soldier on with it for quite a while nd anything could be happening to them . Not everyone is one of the time wasting, resource sapping cases we see on telly.

@Arnoldthecat Although concerning, abdo pain that has been going on for 3 months does NOT constitute an emergency. If you go to a gp it is there job to refer you to a hospital for scans, endoscopy etc. If they are not doing this then you can ask for another gp to examine you. It is not acceptable to go to an EMERGENCY department and take the time and space away from others who need immediate care.

ICU nurse in north west, not a big city hospital.
Our ICU massively expanded to cope with the pandemic, we took over 2-3 wards and also used many of their staff as support workers. First few months very busy, now most patients are overwhelmingly covid negative but we have to maintain extra wards to quarantine admissions (need 3 neg swabs unless they've self isolated for 2 weeks before admission) so logistically it's a nightmare with regards to staffing. We are in a bit of a hot spot so we are getting the odd very ill covid patient but they can literally be the only patient in a whole ward because they have to be isolated !

Only 3 covid patients but getting back to being busy. Quite a few complex patients who should have been in hospital before now and also complex home situations with increase in safeguarding referrals and lots of elderly partners not wanting their other half home again due to verbal or physical or emotional abuse which understandably has sky rocketed during lockdown.

Arnoldthecat

‘Dalmatianmad abdo pain for 3 months why might this be perceived as an un-necessary visit ? I'm thinking someone could have just sat on the problem,tried to manage,self medicate,been unable to access a GP etc ??’

Because its Accident and Emergency. This example is neither. This patient needs a GP appt or a discussion with 111.

The Trust I work for is getting much busier too but not crazy busy just yet. Very few Covid patients now thankfully, hooing it remains that way.

I appreciate what you are saying but you could well have a case where for whatever reason, the GP doesnt refer for imagining/diagnostics and the patient,putting all their trust in the GP accepts the GPs diagnosis whether its IBS or wind or whatever,,,it caries on and on and hey presto they end up having something horrendous like bowel cancer..

@Arnoldthecat but A&E isn't the right way to access those tests either - they are there to decide if you are sick enough to need admission, do immediate initial treatment and move on, not investigate chronic problems. When I worked in ED we weren't even allowed to request endoscopies etc unless the patient was actively bleeding, so it wouldn't speed up someone's diagnosis anyway.

The issue we have is that some patients think we are a 24/7 GP service with infinite scans, diagnostics and specialists to immediately treat your chronic complaint! This is not the case we are skeleton staff with limited resources there to treat the sickest in their hour of need! So please don’t come to ED with a three month history of abdo pain. You won’t get a scan, or a scope or see a surgeon, you will be told to book in with your GP so don’t waste all of our time!

@Brieminewine people are having a lot of trouble seeing GPs though. So that is part of the problem. Anyway you could easily have abdoninal pain for three months that is getting worse and worse, the GP won't see you or they will and you are waiting for a referral to come through and you end up at A&E in desperation.

Often inappropriate attendance at A&E isn't because of a moral failing in the patient but because other parts of the health service aren't working properly.

@Sweetnhappy1 Thanks sorry I missed reply until now.
The accusation was part of the "Google and Facebook are collecting data on us all so that they can sell it to advertisers or sell it to Governments so they can control us."
I'm not bothered by governments, none are capable of applying it even if they built a system that worked.
But I am concerned that third parties can get hold of our records, therefore could identify us. We have to agree to that when we sign up. (in our practice). see your T&Cs.

Icu sister in the midlands, we haven't had a covid positive patient in weeks now, only one or two in the hospital at any one time too. Now we have a lot of people who have sat on illness' without seeking treatment and are far sicker than they would have been if seen earlier. Back to as busy as we were before covid.

Icu sister in the midlands, we haven't had a covid positive patient in weeks now, only one or two in the hospital at any one time too. Now we have a lot of people who have sat on illness' without seeking treatment and are far sicker than they would have been if seen earlier. Back to as busy as we were before covid.

Well maybe we should have some kind of bloody healthcare system where people aren't left waiting with abdominal pain for three fucking months, if you don't want them to come to a&e. This attitude pisses me off. Don't blame the patient whose healthcare system has failed them.

I don’t believe that if you are calling the GP’s every day for three months complaining of pain they would refuse to see you or organise any investigations, so I don’t think that argument is valid.

Surgeon in the south east at tertiary centre. Only 2 in ICU , far fewer COVID patients on the ward. However we are busy with all the emergency presentations of things that have backed up. We are seeing 25 % of normal numbers in clinics due to social distancing and only 40% theatre capacity as everything takes so long donning and doffing, less ITU capacity as a whole ITU is out of action because of 2 covid patients and more medical
Emergencies. Lots of staff off sick due to fatigue / sob post covid.

As someone who was admitted for emergency surgery via a&e for an ovarian tumour that torsioned, ofc I didn't call the GP every day for three months. I did call them several times though, was told I was perimenopausal and prescribed tranexamic acid. This was pre covid. I did my best to take responsibility for my health, even though I had to allow forty minutes for each time I phoned and then leave my phone on my desk to receive the return call each time and run out to answer it, only to be told yet again that all I needed was a prescription and there aren't any appointments available anyway. I dunno, maybe it's my fault I ended up in agonising pain and nearly died that night because I was such a fucking fool as to not literally make a phone call every day for three months, but actually I think I'll lay the blame at a shit healthcare system that denied me proper treatment even though I clearly explained my symptoms several times. Soz I misused a&e tho.

I work in a large very busy city hospital.
We currently have 10 Covid patients, 3 of whom are in icu, the rest in a general covid ward. I dont know of any staff in my department that have tested positive (we have weekly tests)
In fact I don't know of anyone personally that's had it.

That’s not we’re talking about though is it, of course acute severe abdominal pain is a medical emergency. What the PP and myself are referring to is patients that have had mild abdominal discomfort on and off for a long period of time but decided today is the day to do something about it and attend ED. This is of course interchangeable for any chronic complaint and is something we see day in day out and is a misuse of the ED service.

Can I ask a question please. Why aren’t routine clinics etc starting to happen again?

My child was diagnosed with moderate hearing loss at the start of the year and was referred to see a consultant. This appointment was due the end of March and got cancelled for obvious reasons. She’s been having speech therapy which has started up again and the therapist asked about the hearing test and said I should find out from ENT when it would happen. The ENT told me that routine clinics wouldn’t start again for another 2 months minimum. I live in the area of the country which has been least hit by Covid so my question is “what are they actually doing right now?”

Please don’t take this as a criticism, I fully appreciate how hard hospitals have worked, it’s just if they closed everything to cope with a potential influx of Covid in an area, and that never happened, why are they waiting to open up again. Surely the longer it takes to open up, the more of a backlog? Presumably you could start to reopen clinics and then close them down again at the hint of a spike? Especially in a place which really hasn’t been hit badly by it.

The cases in Florida got me thinking about this. They’ve gone nuts but I wondered if there was still the same huge amount of hospitalisations per increase in cases or whether somehow the virus is becoming weaker..?!

I don’t believe there’s any evidence the virus has got any weaker. We’ve now managed to bring down infections through months of lockdown and social distancing... Now we just have to ensure we don’t undo all that good work by fooling ourselves it’s gone as things could get a lot worse if we collectively think “it’s all over”.... we had low numbers in January... by March we were locked down.

This is my area, very worrying. I calmed down during lockdown but am very stressed again.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8524675/85-new-coronavirus-infections-Blackburn-South-Asians-local-lockdown-looms.html

@Fredocorleone clinics have been back open since the beginning of the month at my hospital, I would maybe call your consultants secretary for an update. The backlog is huge now though, they have reduced capacity and also have to factor in time to clean the area inbetween patients so the waiting list is longer than ever unfortunately.