I witnessed how fucked up the NHS is

[Bloom15]

Last night I had an asthma attack and got a taxi to the nearest A and E. it was like a scene from a zombie movie!

I was rushed through triage and given 2 nebulisers and some oxygen, along with some steroids. After I was stable I was told to wait in the waiting area. It was mostly full of people on drugs, drunks and people asleep on the row of chairs surrounded by multiple carrier bags. I am not trying to disparage these people as they were also patients and needed to be seen. Just describing the waiting room at 11pm on a Bank Holiday Monday in a city centre a and e department.

After 6 hours I still hadn't been seen by a doctor but had to leave as my DS was staying over at my parents and they were dropping him off at 8 am as they were going on holiday. My DH was stuck in Newcastle following a stag break and couldn't get home at 4am. Usually I could have stayed.

Now I am at home with a tight chest (DH rushed home early but a taxi from Newcastle to Liverpool at 5am was too much money). I tried to call my GP for an appointment to get more steroids but after 45 minutes of ringing from 8 there were no appointments left.

This is not the fault of the doctors, nurses, other staff, any patients. This is the fault of this government dragging the NHS to the brink. Please vote them out in May

How is any government of any colour responsible for druggies, drunks, the morbidly obese etc? We get the NHS we, as a whole, deserve. Unless people take personal responsibility for their health nothing will get better. Took my DP to A and E and probably 50% if not more were drunk/ druggies causing mayhem all having to be dealt with by nurses and police. DP was dealt within 30mins as he had a recurrence of a very dangerous problem needing very prompt action before being admitted. One drunk ( alcoholic ? )caused chaos demanding his cans of booze back despite being told no alcohol in the assessment area. He needed to have 1:1 to keep him under control. He was just one of at least 4 I personally saw in 30 mins.

Welcome to Loony Labour if you vote the conservatives out.

You will regret it.

@OneWildBiscuit It won’t make much difference. Where are the £billions coming from the nHS “needs”. It just soaks up money. We cannot keep borrowing. Your DC will be paying it back while you enjoy your very decent pension. Others will be working longer to pay for the NHS with much lower pensions. It’s not adding up, and it needs to be changed. Or maybe we sold up skill the armed forces or maybe have 40 in a class at school or perhaps cut back on the police. We cannot have it all so Labour, who don’t want to raise taxes, will have a very tough job. Be prepared to be disillusioned!

As soon as you start privatising bits of it…

But large bits of it have always been private. GPs are private businesses, as are dentists, opticians and pharmacists. Consultant contracts are the way they are specifically to allow them to do private work alongside NHS work. This all stems back to how private and charitable medical provision was incorporated into the NHS at the start and are where many of the problems stem from. It was compromised from the start. The biggest problem with changing it will be the same as existed when it was set up - doctors and their unions.

You do know that the LibDems won't get enough votes to get into No10 don't you? Ever.

I do know. But if enough people vote for the Lib Dem’s, Labour will be forced to lead with a minority government and will be resigned to forming a formal or informal coalition with the Lib Dems. We know from Cameron’s first term that the Lib Dems would be good at tempering Labour’s ill thought out policies.

It's very hit and miss. A&E is always terrible for all the reasons listed above.

However DH took his elderly DF for an appointment today and came back singing praises of everyone he met. Everyone was helpful and friendly. They arrived a bit early and were seen ahead of the next two patients who hadn't arrived, all done in 20 mins and back home 1 hour later.

Meanwhile it was the Winter of Discontent is 1978/79 under a Labour government which killed my grandmother. With ambulance workers on strike, she was taken to hospital after a stroke in an open-backed army truck, in sub-zero temperatures. She basically died of hypothermia.

Don't assume Labour will solve anything fast, or at all.

IMO we need to stop paying for non-life threatening treatments on the NHS, or at least introduce some form of contribution system for those.
And look again at where money is going. WHY is the NHS spending £115 million on translating materials into every language? (Source: https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/nhs_spending_on_interpreters_and_translation_services)
Translation costs should be billed. If you want to benefit from the British healthcare service you should expect to speak the language it operates in - English!

If I go to a hospital in France/Spain/Germany they regard it as my problem that I don't speak the language, not theirs. When DS needed to go to hospital in Spain they suggested I open Google translate!

I agree that the nhs is broken and needs urgent funds. But I wonder how many people realise how many DNAs we get consistently for clinic appointments? I could see double the capacity of people if I didn’t get so many cancellations.

Yeah, a time when midwife sent me in to A & E about a year ago for suspected DVT, waited hours and hours and then phoned midwife again from there to say was going home but she insisted I stay there until seen by a doctor as she said that DVT needed immediate treatment to prevent it from spreading/worsening (can't remember her exact words, but just the gist of it), managed after several hours to get Grandparents to come to the A&E to pick up and take care of a bored and tired 3 y.o. overnight, but 8 months pregnant with no where to sit for hours.
According to the information board there were about 90 patients waiting (it's always nights and wknds coz GPs are closed 😅)
Eventually some kind man with a broken arm got his son to give up his seat for me. Another hour later and a doctor came out and addressed everyone, saying "we are too full"
I worried that he was going to send us all home without being seen because they were full to capacity, but he just went on to say, "there aren't enough seats for the people who really need them, so could the friends and family members accompanying the patients, please wait outside".

Thankfully, it wasn't DVT after all that 😅

I feel your sentiments wishing you speedy recovery. I was in A&E bank holiday Monday too, there were drunks, drug users, people who got into brawls over the weekend. Police officers keeping guard over some patients. The nurse treating me ( gp referral) said b/h is the worst time because people have partied all weekend! Another medic saying he can’t give me very strong painkillers other than Codine otherwise there will be queues round the building!

There is underfunding and understaffing but NHS is abused by self entitled folk thinking they can misuse a valuable and precious free service as they please.

I had a similarly horrific experience earlier this year accompanying my husband with a tooth abscess over a bank Holliday weekend. Twelve hours travelling from dentist to emergency dentist to hospital to another hospital. Sitting in waiting rooms full of ill, sick and some quite threatening people. Hell on Earth.
tThe medic we eventually saw prescribed medication and said “come back if it doesn’t improve” I said “no way”!
….then there were no chemists open who had the prescribed medicine.
absolute hell.

So true. I would say charge people who DNA but having said that many time appointment letter either fail to arrive are even are never posted! DP has had appointment letters arrive on the day or even after the day.. plPlus 2 letters arriving, one with an appointment the other cancelling it. The whole admin of the NHS needs a bomb up its rear end.

If you are registered with a dentist they are obliged to provide emergency cover. A dental abscess should be dealt with by your dentist not a&e.

Agree. I’ve had an appointment letter offering me an appointment which I then missed because both the letter and the appointment arrived when I was away for just one week. I once submitted a complaint when two dc who were both referred to the same department within a year, from completely different directions, had their referrals lost. In the last few years people in my family have been ‘lost’ from the system four times due to retiring doctors, or for no apparent reason, when under active monitoring and we’ve only got back into the system after repeated phone calls when I realised we hadn’t received review appointments months after they should have happened. Not to mention the nine month wait for my dc orthodontic treatment to be assessed and approved by an administrative department that doesn’t even deal with patients directly.

This all under the SNP, not the Tories.

As someone who works for the NHS, in a GP surgery, I’m so shocked they didn’t fit you in. I’ve worked in multiple surgery’s and anything of this nature would be fitted/squeezed in. Even it you had called just before closing.

Maybe look at registering at a different surgery, I know the NHS is struggling (especially hospitals) but this feels very extreme that your doctors didn’t fit you in. unless the receptionist wasn’t aware of the urgency and fobbed you off?!

@Timetickingg Here in the US (I know, the healthcare system here is a whole other issue!), you’re typically charged $50 if you don’t show up for an appointment, you need to cancel at least 24 hours in advance.

In reality, doctors are understanding if there’s a genuine reason why you can’t make it, such as an ill child, etc., but knowing that you could be charged is a definite incentive to make it! If there’s been an admin. mixup such as a letter not arriving, they’d also let you off.

Repeat offenders can be removed from their patient list.

I think one issue in the UK is we are insulated from the true cost of healthcare. Just take your pet to the vet makes you realise how much it costs (though fortunately my vet doesn’t charge if your cat escapes outdoors when you try to catch them)

Glad you’re feeling better/got sorted. I was going to suggest you style it out, head back there and ask receptionist how much longer to wait. You’ve been sitting there quietly in corner for 24 hours and worried
they called your name when you were in the loo.

I went to A & E with pains in my calf (had knee surgery week before) waited 3 hrs, only female there waiting amongst all these men ( don’t want to say what I thought of them but I didn’t feel safe)! Was a 4 hr wait, next time I looked, the board said 8hrs- I cancelled at the reception (only one female on duty) she tried to persuade me to stay but I said I would take my chances & left.. 8 more blokes queued up waiting to book 😩NHS IS FUCKED FOR SURE! Doesn’t help that we getting an influx of migrants- system can’t cope! Can’t see labour doing much either TBH

My mum had an appointment letter for cancer treatment come through the letterbox on the day of the appointment, half an hour after the time of the appointment.

It was impossible to contact them by phone on the day to explain the situation. It just rang out.

She was so ill by that point she would have really struggled to make it there even if it had been later on the day. She needed to be able to kind of screw up all her energy and efforts to make it to these kind of things by that point.

It really affected her emotionally too.

There is an enormous difference between GP practices with self employed GPs who employ nurses and other staff, and large private conglomerates moving in.
My local GP practice, the GPs live locally. They care about the local area and the people who live there. The other GP practice is run by a US conglomerate who do not give a shit about local people, and it shows.

@YourPinkDog I had no idea that American companies were involved in GP practices in the UK. I’m sorry that your area isn’t getting good service.

IMO, the main issue that we have in the US isn’t service, it’s cost. If you’ve got health insurance (which is more accessible since the 2010 Affordable Care Act was introduced), you can get good service. Most people don’t need referrals for consultants, for example, you contact a pediatrician’s or a dermatologist’s office and make an appointment directly with them.

@BruFord we have private healthcare as well where you can pay and contact a consultant directly, or a private GP.
Most GPs though are NHS and free to access. The US conglomerates who take over NHS GP practices make money by providing a reduced service within the contract. And they seem to have a high turnover of GPs and lots of newly qualified GPs.

I went to my A and E recently. It had a zero- one hour wait sign up and we were in, x rayed, pain relief, splinted up with an appointment for the next days fracture clinic and back out the door in 90 minutes. It was a weeknight. Rather than a weekend but I was really impressed as I was expecting the zombie apocalypse.