How can this be?

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.

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

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

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?

We hear very little from the well paid Amanda Pritchard.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Bed management relies on social care working properly too.

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.

screw = several

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

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?

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.

SueDonim

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.

Yes, we sat opposite one such very young woman and her friend when we spent a long time in A&E not long ago. She was very troubled and full of rambling stories and claims.

Luckygirl, the practical action will be to set up a sort of campsite for the grand daughter in a and e. She can't eat or drink without help so she obviously needs an attendant, and a comfortable private curtained spot to be toileted. If NHS can't or won't provide it then her relatives can do so. A and e chairs are not suited to ill patients for longer than about half an hour, if that. She will need a comfortable chair preferably a reclining one.

I was in hospital last month with a stroke in a ward where patients could not be sure of having a blanket, on their bed, I was sometimes cold, and my relative brought in a small duvet from home. The time has come when patients need relatives to do some of the bedside care.

Apropos, please see Cadenza123, above.

Our parish magazine arrived yesterday. In it was a full page advert for a private GP practice opening up in a nearby village.

Doesn't that say it all about how low our health service has fallenwith two members of my family brought close to death because GPs at the end of phones forgot to order vital tests or see the signifcance of certain symptoms because they did not see the patient, with having over 6 months of ill health, without ever managing to see a GP, while a hospital research programme obsessed with a symptom I didn't have and dismisssed the symptoms i did have. I can see that i might very well end up there some time this year.

There is a private health care company round here which does out of hours GP work. I think the local GPs pay for it maybe ... it is free to the patient. I do not know how it works financially.

Following my accident on 05/01 I was taken by ambulance to A&E, went straight into Resus and they saved my life. I spent 4 days in HDU then another 9 days on a ward during that time I met several patients and not one of them had received proper care in a timely way resulting in a more serious outcome and a longer time spent in hospital. I was really shocked at just how bad things are. I was completely dependent on the nursing staff for the first week and they were so busy it was really difficult to ask for help, so I was often too cold, too hot or just very uncomfortable. The food was dreadful. Three of us were discharged on the same day, one needed an ambulance and after waiting 24 hours on the ward and 20 hours in a discharge lounge she got her partner to take her home by car although that was very difficult for her, another woman spent the night prior to discharge in a corridor and I spent 8 hours on a chair in the discharge lounge waiting for my discharge note and drugs. I was totally exhausted. The NHS is in the most awful mess, it can be soul destroying for staff working in it and worst of all, if people got the treatment they needed when they needed it, they would be less ill, spend less time in hospital and would cost the NHS less money.

The consensus among Grans is pretty plain. How may volunteers on a sort of all hands to the wheel manner work to benefit patients? They are having to do this in Gaza.

Monica, it happened here pre covid. The only way to see a GP is to pay £60 - which may have gone up. Our practise will get a GP to call you if necessary but forget actually having an examination.

Eyes are also private and ears

I'm sorry if I have been a bit prickly on this thread but I just worry about vulnerable people being able to access the services they require and leaving children in pain is just plain cruel

I don;t blame the staff. I blame the system we have in place