How can this be?

Had the unfortunate experience of spending a day in A and E this week. Heard one nurse, who was very upset, saying that she had 60 patients out there and one seriously ill in the corridor. This is the reality of our health care service. I'm so sorry for you GD and hope that she's soon admitted. It is awful for her to have to suffer like this. It's hard to imagine the current reality of the NHS until you've had first hand experience. The staff that I observed were working their socks off.

Luckygirl3

Not in our local hospital ... it is not a place where doing anything is easy ... it is chaos. There is nothing easy about sitting on a hard chair in a stuffed waiting room vomiting for hours and dashing back and forth to the loo. It is degrading and unacceptable. We should not be making excuses for this.

I couldn't agree more. The situation in the NHS is becoming normalized by the public and instead of shouting about it, we are just accepting it and that's no good for anyone now or in the future.
I wonder how many people in the UK would be happy to pay a few pounds each month into a ring fenced fund that was used solely for the NHS and would not alllwnthe money to be siphoned off into other areas?

Suedonim, my friend is a policewoman and lots of the calls they receive are due to people in society not coping too. She said a lot of people are relieved when they are arrested. It’s all very complex isn’t it? and I imagine caused directly or indirectly by austerity

screw = several

My dd works at the sharp end of all this, in A&E. So many of the cases she sees aren’t really medical at all, they’re social problems, people struggling with life because they’re in poverty, lack decent housing or have no support structure due to the breakdown of family or community relations. They feel no one cares and attending A&E is a plea for help.

Each of these people had to be triaged and go through the system, though, so that nothing is missed, and that takes up a huge amount of time (each patient requires an average of 2-3hrs to process, with examination/tests and writing up notes). In one unit she works in they see the same person screw, times a week, often claiming to have overdosed. They can’t assume they’re crying wolf so blood tests need to be taken and so on.

The NHS is assuming the troubles of our society/communities well as our ill health.

Bed management relies on social care working properly too.

It's all about bed management
There aren't enough

^It is important to remember that when we talk about more beds that also means more staff to provide the care people need. We have more than 100,000 vacancies in the NHS currently, the number one concern for trust leaders^".
However, we have fewer beds per head of population compared to other countries – just one bed for every 500 people in England according to this report, one of the lowest rates among OECD nations.

Director of policy and strategy and interim deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, Miriam Deakin
July 2022

nhsproviders.org/news-blogs/news/extra-beds-staff-and-capacity-needed-across-the-nhs

The head of the NHS has praised the hard work of staff for rolling out 5,000 additional permanent, staffed beds this winter – during a period of industrial action and significant pressure.
January 2024
5,000 is a start but are there extra staff?

Shocking to hear that harrigran. 💐 Such events must torture you looking back. Helpless and desperate for good palliative care. Where has compassion gone?

Someone - anyone - needs to take the NHS by the scruff of its neck and give it a bluddy good shake up. Be good to hear from Amanda Pritchard occasionally for NHS England. Whopping salaries these folk are on.

Urmstongran

The RF don’t have to hang about do they? I hate inequality.

Even if I opt to go privately for the two operations I need (not life-saving but to improve quality of life 🤞), the waiting list for the private hospital is 3-4 months as they take on more and more patients who have been on the NHS waiting list for years.

JaneJudge

It doesn’t matter if some hospitals in India are worse. There is no need for our healthcare to be so bad. We have all paid into a system where it should be funded properly. People not receiving treatment and lying in pain does not suggest it is being funded properly. We have Drs and nurses in the family too. They don’t defend it at all. They are all burnt out too and in fact I think one is heading for a breakdown

I agree.

The NHS has changed drastically since it was first set up, both in the needs of the patients and the medical care it provides.
However, it is just not keeping up with the demands on it through lack of resources which means lack of funding.

Absolutely disgraceful, as others have said it didn't happen when I worked in the NHS.
Treatment or should I say non treatment happened to DH when he was dying, lying in A&E for 10 hours before being admitted to a ward and just after lockdown so I wasn't allowed to be with him.
It doesn't matter how ill you are the onus is now on the patient to access treatment and to get to the hospital. The shortest waiting time I was quoted was four hours and this was for a dying man collapsed on a wooden floor where I was urged to just make him comfortable 🤬
Time to get shot of some of the highly paid mangers and to rethink certain procedures which perhaps should not be funded by the NHS.

We hear very little from the well paid Amanda Pritchard.

Another example of an underfunded and understaffed NHS struggling to cope. After 14 years who is responsible? Who is in charge of the clattering train?

The RF don’t have to hang about do they? I hate inequality.

It doesn’t matter if some hospitals in India are worse. There is no need for our healthcare to be so bad. We have all paid into a system where it should be funded properly. People not receiving treatment and lying in pain does not suggest it is being funded properly. We have Drs and nurses in the family too. They don’t defend it at all. They are all burnt out too and in fact I think one is heading for a breakdown

It's all about bed management.
There aren't enough.
Our free health care is one of the reasons people risk the sea to get here.
Increasingly we need to look at paying for health care.
Also the housing situation is dire so that puts pressure on a&e.
Main thing though is the GPs. So difficult to get an appt.
And too many people for too few services.

V3ra Thank you for that reassurance. DH is 80 and had bypass surgery 3 years ago. I am very aware how much his continual presence with us is the result of incredible developments in heart surgery during our lifetimes.

*Luckygirl3 My local hospital has a Medical Assessment Unit and a Surgical Assessment Unit and this is where you end up if you are sent direct to hospital by your GP or, with heart problems, direct to Cardiac Critical Care. I have been sent to the MAU twice for emergency minor surgery and it is where DH ended up when he was sent there for a low heart rate last summer. Why no one picked up his heart failure then I just do not understand.

One of the reasons that care in A&E is stretched is that people who could and should go straight to the ward are filtered via A&E. My DGD was at the hospital because the consultant had ordered her admission, and that is exactly what should have happened - and what used to happen.

If you have to be ill, make it emergency and then the care is superb.
🤔

Perhaps in some areas.

M0nica my Dad (92) had a CRT pacemaker fitted just over five years ago and is doing well, so best wishes to your husband 👍

Dad had walked down to the surgery to order his repeat prescription. Felt a bit funny, his pulse was 35 😳
"Straight to hospital with you," said the doctor!
He went by taxi as the ambulance wait time was four hours.

The NHS has reached the stage where the only people able to cope with the privations involved in accessing it are the fit and healthy, and when they do get access they are left wondering whether it was worth the effort.

DH was blued and twoed into hospital last Sunday, diagnosed with heart failure and has had a pace maker fitted. he has been going back and forth to the GP and even had a referral to A&E for 6- 9 months with what we now know were clear signs of heart failure, but no one recognised it. It was only when he became an emergency and an ambulance rushed him directly to the cardiac critical care unit, that diagnosis was finally made and he had the pacemaker fitted and 4 days later is home and well.

If you have to be ill, make it emergency and then the care is superb.

My mum went through something similar last year. We had a phone call from the vascular consultant to say they had arranged the admission for her major surgery and to report to the same day urgent care dept of our local hospital the following day. Mum had pre op tests in the department and was then taken to A&E where she waited four days for a bed. She was then admitted to MAU and waited another two days for a bed on the vascular unit before she could have the surgery. It’s an absolute disgrace that this happens for planned surgery.

I would be so furious about this. crohnes is such an awful disease to have..
sometimes we are too polite. she should not have been allowed to sit with others waiting to be admitted! was it you with her? I would have gone to the reception and insisted she be admitted or have a bed in another waiting area.

I watch gp's behind closed doors on tv and have seen the doctor send a patient straight to a & e to be admitted and told them they will go straight through as they have phoned and arranged it. my heart goes out to your DGD

I am aware that we are better off than third world countries .... but so we should be

I do agree and we are perhaps in danger of ending up in even more dire straits if disillusioned staff keep leaving the NHS.

SueDonim

If we’re judging against foreign hospitals we need to compare like with like. My dd has worked as a medic in Indian public hospitals. If you think the NHS is bad (which I do, in present circumstances) try being in a hospital with no electricity, where you have to go and buy blood if you need a transfusion or drugs because the hospital doesn’t supply them, where your doctor is seeing 100+ patients a day.

I’ve also volunteered in West African hospitals, where there is no electricity overnight, so they depend on generators, if they can get the diesel to operate them, there are often no functioning life support/kidney dialysis/monitoring machines, no incubators, mothers or babies die because they cannot afford life-saving caesarians, there are no nappies or bed linens, blood or drugs available.

People who state that the UK has a third world service really haven’t been to such a hospital and seen the reality.

Our NHS needs intensive care itself, but it’s not on a par with those places.

Hospitals in some foreign countries can be wonderful, like 5* hotels with top doctors from around the world and wonderful nurses in attendance.

I know people who have been patients in these hospitals - because they had good medical insurance when travelling.

If they had had no insurance and had to go to the local public hospitals they would probably have endured conditions such as SueDonim describes.