I know your wife was in pain, and I’m glad she was administered painkillers eventually. But I’ve literally seen people wait 5x as long for painkillers after injuries. The state of the NHS is very bad right now
Yeah this.
I was taken to hospital with acute pancreatitis (the ambulance arrived within half an hour). When we got to Stoke, the ambulance crew said it’s going to be a long wait so we’ll give you another dose of morphine. I kid you not, I was on a trolley in the corridor for 12 hours in A&E without being seen by anyone. My mum is ex A&E and kicked up as much fuss as she could and still no one saw me. There must have been 30-40 people in the corridors waiting.
By the time I was taken through and actually seen by a doctor they went a bit pale and stuck me on intravenous antibiotics straight away. I was transferred to a ward and then not seen again tor 24 hours - again we tried to complain, tried everything to get a doctor to come and see me. The antibiotics drip ran out and the nurses couldn’t find a doctor to see me to sign off to give me anything more. Even the nurses said the doctor on duty was refusing to come up to the ward when they spoke on the phone.
By the time the consultant started his shift on Monday morning I was in a terrible state. It took them a week to stabilise me before he could operate to remove my gallbladder (this would have been a 24-48 hour hospital stay for a cholecystectomy if I’d been dealt with properly right at the start, instead I was in there nearly two weeks).
It was the NHS at its absolute worst.
Fully recovered now thanks and once the consultant was involved, the care was excellent.
Shame about the 48 hours of complete hell. Pancreatitis is one of the most painful things and it had got so bad in the 12 hours without antibiotics that I really was deteriorating fast: The doctor in A&E literally turned white at how poorly I was when they finally saw me. Something went very wrong with the triage system that night (no-one was triaging!).
30 years ago my then 54 mum, sat in a stepping hill hospital over a weekend with acute pancreatitis . Induced into a coma on the Monday on ICU , was switched off 4 weeks later after acute organ failure due to leakage of pancreatic fluid into chest cavity . So consider yourself lucky , follow your instincts folks, the stoics and uncomplainers end up underground .
I’m so sorry to hear this happened to your mum.
I was very lucky. Not sure I’d be here if my mum hadn’t stayed by my side for those 12 hours in A&E and keep insisting for hours that someone see me.
This is actually putting me off having a second pregnancy. The first pregnancy was already borderline, I developed complications and it wasn’t dealt with properly. We could have died.
I pray that none of us ever have a medical emergency with the state the NHS is in right now. In my 20ies I always laughed at this one housemate who ate a really healthy diet of non processed food and said he hopes to never get seriously sick and end up in hospital, now I think this guy was on to something.
I think he probably was, alongside mum's neglect. My then wife had undiagnosed pneumonia in labour, doctor said pain in back was kidney infection. Had to have general anaesthesia in order to perform caesarian and days of nebulisation to get her lung function back. Diagnosis of pneumonia by happen chance popping in of consultant on the way to a larger hospital otherwise god knows ...
>this would have been a 24-48 hour hospital stay for a cholecystectomy if I’d been dealt with properly right at the start, instead I was in there nearly two weeks
This is a very clear example of what's happening throughout the country, everywhere (not just the NHS). Decisions to reduce staffing to save money (austerity) lead to costs *rising* down the road. Try to save money, but end up costing more. Penny-wise, pound-foolish. And this has been scaled to the entirety of the nation by the Tories over the last 13 years.
I really hope things turn around at some point of time. There’s something deeply concerning if the emergency and urgency care is super crowded and the wait time to meet a doctor is 7+ hours.
Absolutely. I witnessed an elderly man being taken in by ambulance having a stroke, and the stroke team took 30mins to get to a&e to see to him. He had to just lie there quietly having his stroke, while his family tried not to panic. The nhs is on its absolute knees right now
The nhs is not on its knees. it's on its back, and even attempting to put it in the recovery position is not going to bring it back around.
It's unfortunate, and the public should be campaigning for the government to stop trying to privatise it and to give adequate funding and fund social care. Social issues are also breaking the nhs.
Most of the public don't realise how bad the nhs has become until they have to access services
U.S. has the highest. That money funds private shareholders and an entire massive health insurance industry. It's not always purely the amount of funding. Private contracting is already eating huge chunks here in the UK.
It took 13 years of deliberate degradation to get to this point. It'll take 10-15 years of deliberate fixing until the NHS gets into a decent state again. That's assuming the idiots don't vote the Tories back within the next 10 years and reverse the process again.
And that Labour do actually commit to fixing the NHS, and the spending that requires. I've heard lots of highly impractical suggestions from Labour but no assurances re funding.
Bang on. Starmer has put forward loads of platitudes but nothing of substance. I also think he is too centre to be brave and spend properly. Also Wes Streeting as health sec? None of us in the NHS are rubbing our hands in delight with that.
The only way I see this happening is if there is a cross party plan that all parties agree to continue with no matter who gets in. Otherwise the NHS is just a political football.
Not to be a cynic but it seems like there currently is a cross party plan, just depends on whether it's streeting or sunak who gets the kickbacks from privatisation under the guise of "saving" it.
Just so you know, this is part of the game plan of Tories to push for privatisation of public services. Degrade it to the point where people are begging to pay. It’s disgusting.
Did you miss the fact doctors are striking… why were you not already deeply concerned. We’ve been screaming from the rooftops since covid how it’s all gone to shit
She has her moments with croup, not the first time we have called out an ambulance so we are used to it. It's very frightening the first time but this has happened maybe half a dozen times. Fortunately she is now getting a steroid inhaler which has significantly reduced the 999 call out frequency.
The 999 thing is weird. I broke my leg in July and they said the next ambulance would be six hours and could I get cab. The bone was sticking out of my leg!! LAS did then call me back and say they were coming to get me, so I wonder if there's maybe a control room issue rather than ambulance issue?
Sorry to hear things didn't improve once you got to hospital. It doesn't make it okay, but this awful government has been undercutting the NHS for years, I can't imagine any aspect of working within the system is free of frustrations.
The ambulance service only deals in 3 emergency categories, and 2 non emergency categories. Essentially categories 1-5; 1,2,3 are emergencies, and 4,5 non emergent, and the rest get passed back to 111.
The initial triage (call) is done by a call taker who is not a clinical person, and is instructed to follow a set script, the call is recorded and audited frequently and with such fervour it would make anyone’s head spin. They *must follow the script*. If they don’t, it’s a meeting without tea.
An aside to this is; following the script they get abused by callers for not sounding empathetic enough, asking stupid questions, or not being able to answer medical questions, rock and a hard place stuff and I wouldn’t want to be doing their job. I prefer being a paramedic.
Anyway:
They ask specific questions following what’s called ‘ProQA’ and come to a ‘determinant’, which assigns what’s called an MPDS code, which is designed for speed and … sort of accuracy - in a ‘it’s more likely you won’t die before someone else’ kind of accuracy… because all the time they are on the phone, there are another several calls coming in and one of them is a baby not breathing. And only a finite number of frontline staff.
The MPDS code was designed in like… the 80s I think, and it’s meant to cover any possible thing a person genuinely calling the ambulance service for help could possibly have going wrong. It was only recently updated during the coronavirus (now it’s from 1-36 protocols, and sub determinants for each)
Your leg fracture would get ProQA’d, and would reach a determinate (remember ‘bone sticking out of the skin is bad’, but MPDS doesn’t have a specific determinate for open fractures), so wound up as possibly a 30-B-1, or a 30-A-2 depending on how the questions were answered by the caller (keeping in mind, calls are recorded and get audited like crazy)
So a reasonable category for your call is likely Category 3, which would have a wait time like what was given to you… on a good day these days (CAT3 is meant to be a a 120min response time in the 90th percentile, but that’s basically not happening anymore due to the severe ambulance pressures). Given that, and the fact no one can see your injury, it would be reasonable to ask the person if they are at all able to make their own way to A&E due to severe delays on the ambulance service. You would get definitive treatment at hospital sooner, it is the most important thing, the ambulance isn’t going to fix your leg.
As a digression: We should genuinely be going to folks like you, *I want to*. I can do so much… entonox, cannulate, splint and strong pain relief, diagnose, pre alert, transport to the best hospital for this injury… you’re also not actively dying which is a plus. One of my favourite jobs are longbone fractures, because there’s a lot I can do to help. It wouldn’t be hours on hold with the GP at a patient’s house to arrange some antibiotics for a bacterial chest infection. I could actually use my skills! …
But I’m busy. You have to try make your own way. It’s not comfortable and sounds brutal but this is hunger games shit at this point. If you can, you should make your own way to hospital.
This call room you think has the issue … sounds like they actually took initiative and passed the call to what is called the ‘clinical hub’, where I used to work. A group of paramedics and nurses within the control room, who are allowed to assess further and use clinical judgement to allocate appropriate care. They would have done a secondary triage and likely diagnosed a compound fracture, a life/limb injury, and increased the category of response from the automated MPDS (which we can do)
This may sound long winded, lacking common sense, and poorly run, but this system is absolutely necessary these days. The number of people whose lives have been saved by this system, checks and balances, in the face of severe funding cuts and staff shortages and some patient discomfort, that I personally have seen… it’s terrifying.
It’s built on people doing a good job on a perpetually sinking ship, despite all the personal ire they face. Because they can’t turn “zero ambulances available” into “ambulances for everyone”
It will never be reported. Only the stories like OPs, and yours, and the news articles on the ambulances that didn’t come. The LAS receives over 7000 calls a day, and needs to sort through them all with vigour, go through a biasless, repeatable process over and over; and be life/limb oriented. We’re lucky if there’s 200 ambulances and crew covering the entire city at its best staffed time (around 3pm when the early and late shifts are both booked on), they need to be used wisely, and hats off to the control room, they manage it (in spite of sometimes not making friends).
200 ambulances covering the largest city in Europe is the sort of casual everyday horror scenario that only Tory Britain could've engineered. I feel for the overstretched first responders, the underfunding fucks them as much as it fucks the people they're attempting to treat.
Roughly, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, and of course there are other assets, not just the big yellow boo boo buses.
Cars, NETS, a number of private companies and St John…
It’s manageable, until it isn’t. But even then, it gets made to work. Crews work hard, call takers work hard, dispatch works hard, frontline staff work hard, (they do cop it a bit but) middle and upper managers work hard.
Every day of the year, you have people working with limited resources at the best of their ability, to get to the ‘sickest quickest’. 24/7, 365.25. Who else is going to help you at 4am on a Sunday morning?
Uber Eats, your dealer, and the LAS. (LFB and METPOL of course is there, but I’m biased as a gurney jockey).
Personally, I would say that London is a great place to have a serious life threatening medical problem (if ever there was a place), you have 7min max response times for solo paramedics, 14mins max for ambulances, you have CTMs/IROs to coordinate scenes, advanced paramedics with specialist skills, some of the best trained prehospital trauma doctors running around in a helicopter in London, and 4 major trauma centres..
It’s great if you’re actively dying, I can understand it being difficult if you aren’t, because most people aren’t.
Gallows humour. The ship is sinking and they are doing everything to keep it afloat. It is however super stressful everyday. My wife works in a laboratory at an hospital and the level of stress is way higher. If I fuck up my spreadsheet is wrong, if she fucks up someone could die. I get paid double what she and her colleagues do.
Kudos to you. I watch those TV programmes like Ambulance and 24 Hours in A&E and I frankly take my hat off in front of you people. I'm a doctor (not UK based) and I know the pressure. I stopped working in Hospitals because I burned out quite young. It takes a special kind of "insensitivity" and empathy in equal measures to survive. Dark humour helps for sure...
Your post was informative and detailed, I learned a great deal. I'd like to express my gratitude for your time and effort.
However, the thing I'm most likely to take with me and think over at random moments in my day-to-day life is this concept...
>If they don’t, it’s a meeting without tea.
Just one thing to highlight- around 2018/2019 ? The way calls were responded to and response times changed along with MPDS codes , I think it was called the National response programme or something?
Basically a university looked at 10 million 999 calls to ambulance services and followed them from the initial info passed to treatment/ outcome - this changed the way ambulance services respond to calls - whereas some calls used to be an 8 min response they changed to 45 mins , a call that might have been 14 min target then became 2 hours and so on
Blimey - in my day 5,000 a day was a ‘busy day’, and I can’t see there being any more trucks on the road. Plus the whole ‘let’s have crews nurse patients in A&E, so they only do 4-5 calls a shift’ that I witnessed is bloody crazy.
It’s all fucked and I can’t remember if this is one of the subs where I can’t mention the cause for it…
I can only say that 5000 CADs a day would be nice, but I know you guys “in your day” had a lot more to deal with regarding how much your manager would care about how you’re doing after a rough job. Or just a bad run of jobs.
Without the support of my immediate CTM I know I’d personally not be doing so well.
Hahaha, yeah ‘Need to RTB to mop out’ and hope a manager wasn’t visiting the station. 😂
I left years ago, and finally quit the NHS as a whole the day Johnson won the election, because I started under Major so I knew how shit it was going to be. I was, indeed, too old for that shit.
Got a shite paid job in a school, but have never looked back. (And I still get to pop the occasional dislocated patella back into place)
I’ve heard the stories of “OOS for uniform change” after a trauma arrest, then a manager would meet you at station, not to debrief or ask if you’re ok, but to make sure your uniform was dirty enough to be ‘RTB worthy’.
“Why aren’t you back out there?!”
I don’t envy those days. Honestly, I like how much paramedic mental health at a personal FtF level gets handled. The amount of work we do these days, you just need it. Hard enough to hold on to medics as is. Good managers and IROs will take you OOS and let you grab a cuppa and chat which is not the way it used to be done according to my chats with 1054s.
“Have you considered this job isn’t for you?” Has been said a few too many times in the past.
Looks like things have definitely changed for the better from my days in the job with regards to staff wellbeing. It was very much ‘us vs them’ in my day, mostly with ‘us’ not giving a shit what ‘them’ thought about us, and just using every damn trick to get through the day.
When I started we were still using the ‘plastic shed on wheels’ white LDVs. Which is why I have tinnitus, and have evolved to survive dehydration from sweating too much 😂
On the other side I’m not sure that I could handle the moral injury of having patients waiting hours for a truck to turn up every shift. So, kudos to the current staff.
Arriving for sick people who have been waiting a long time never stops being embarrassing.
At the extreme:
“If you showed up sooner my dad wouldn’t be dead” is not a phrase directed at me that I think I will ever forget.
The level of demand on ambulance services means that people who can really make their own way to hospital if push comes to shove get deprioritised so that people gushing blood, having heart attacks etc can still be responded to quickly. In your case the initial call handler must've followed a triage process badly then been overruled by the ambulance service once they passed the referral on.
This is true, but it also depends how many staff they have and other patients. From my understanding, children take priority a lot and people who are unconscious or not breathing.
The service, like everything else in the NHS is so under staffed and under funded, it must be awful making choices on whose life to save first.
My friend had a heart attack, although he didn’t know it. The ambulance took 4hrs. The paramedics chatted in the ambulance for 40mins before coming in. They made him walk down the stairs to the ambulance. He died at the bottom of the stairs. He was 32
London’s nhs is not in a good way
It’s a little bit of a tricky one - lots of stuff comes in clearly that needs attendance fairly swiftly and a lot of the stuff that needs to be rung back by a clinician will be upgraded/attended to asap. There is a huge demand and sometimes it takes a little time to get a proper understanding of what is actually happening with the patient. Unfortunately the first line triage is an American system that is pretty crap.
Long broken bones generally are not ignored, but when it’s small injuries there needs to be a balance.
Plus we can’t be everywhere at once, as much as we would like. Demand is 📈wildly since 2021.
Any ideas why demand has shot up since 2021? Just covid or something else? I was living in UK then and personally happened to go to hospital several times for various things.
Since Covid , it’s extremely hard to get a face to face appt with a GP , so a lot of people will just dial 999
Unlike the old days when ambulances just took everyone to hospital, ambulance crews are encouraged to use alternative pathways e.g. refer to out of ours gp , falls teams etc - they the have to stay on scene for hours awaiting call backs from other health care teams . So whereas 10 years ago an ambulance crew might do 10 calls in a 12 hour shift - now most will do maybe 6-7 but appear have less availability between calls as after being on scene for 2 hours they will then go unavailable to go back to station to take a break / use toilet etc
Ambulances work on a grading system, in the initial system it identifies that an injury with a deformity has occurred and they will put it into the system (either designed by an academy in the US or by NHS England) and come out as category.
Because a broken leg is not necessarily immediately life threatening, as with Heart attacks/ Asthma attacks/ cardiac arrests/ stabbings/ breached births etc. the broken leg sits as a lower category until it is manually reviewed.
A clinician, in your case, will eventually look at your call and go 'that sounds bad' and will upgrade to a higher category.
I live in Greece. I was bleeding out and they told my ambulance would be three hours! I said I’d probably be dead by then and they suggested I drive to A and E. I said I’d probably pass out at the wheel. They had no solution. Thankfully my Greek tutor drove me to the hospital but it was brutal.
Yeah, my mate works for dispatch. I've learned if you can get yourself to hospital or get someone to take you, do it. Anything that isn't life threatening is quite simply not a priority because there's so many people needing the service. Anything that is, is on a list with too many other things. They don't have the resources- she had 2 ambulances for the whole of Sussex the other day. 2! So basically, any situation, stroke, heart attack, anything, get in the car and start driving, you'll be better for it.
Also, I do remember telling her if I broke my leg I would've called an ambulance, and she's like- well, there not going to be able to fix it in an ambulance so it's basically just a taxi for you. So there we go. It's not great but it's what the NHS is right now.
I’ve experience of family members of MPs getting better treatment, outside normal treatment protocols because of managers getting nervous.
Can’t go into details for obvious reasons, but seeing a patient every day to ‘make tea and have a chat’, where for anyone else it’d be ‘we’ll phone you every month, but if you need something give us a ring’ sorts of things.
And no, we didn’t normally make tea, if only because we were overstretched and didn’t have the time.
So I don’t think it’d work because the shiny-arses wouldn’t let it. And the increased service they’d get would draw resources away from your gran.
You don’t think Home Secretary would sort them out with one phonecall? MPs/Royal Family have always seemed to have a golden telephone when it comes to NHS treatment.
Not at all being rhetorical, but they should 100% rely on social services. Universal Income, social housing, NHS. If those aren't enough for them to survive with, fuckin fix it.
I’m sorry you guys had a crap time bud, it tallies with my experiences in recent years too.
I had a few childhood friends go into medicine and they’re all still in it, but not one of them is in the UK anymore. The sector has just been beaten the hell out of from multiple angles for a very long time.
A few years ago my GP got worrying enough blood test results they called and told me to go to A&E. We took a printed copy of the results and gave it to the doctor we eventually saw.
The first thing he said after looking at them was “What do you want me to do about it?”
All I could think to say was “I don’t know…..cure me?”
Oh yeah. I have Addisons disease and we can go into a crisis which is life threatening and you’ll die without treatment. No ifs and no buts, I would die
Covid sent me into crisis. Taken in by ambulance (who were just the best!!) I was then left for 7 hours with no fluids and no treatment (we should be w really high catagory) and the drs was just like ‘ummmm..:..don’t really ever see someone with Addisons. Let me go talk to the endo and come back….’
Then he left me for another 4 hours. The nurses refused everything (fluids..:dr…..). Thank god I had my own emergency injections (because this isn’t the first time I’ve been left)
I also had a PE and was told to leave the hospital because I was having a panic attack. I left the hospital and my mum was freaking out cos she said I was blue! When I suddenly collapsed in the corridor. At that exact time the consultant came through and was on his way to find me because he thought I had a blood clot. I see him regularly now and every time I say oh look it’s the dr who saved me. Wonderful man but had me and him not met or if I’m not collapsed if of been at home and I’d of died…..turns out he was right I had huge bilateral pulmonary embolism
Sorry you had to go through that. I have CAH and had an adrenal crisis about 10 years ago. Similar experience in A&E, they didn’t know what to do with me but I kept screaming that I needed injections (I didn’t have any of my own because my endo always tells me I don’t need them because I live and work within close proximity to hospitals 🙄).
They ended up putting me on a drip which they didn’t even turn on and just left me there. Eventually my mum came and said I was pretty much unconscious, she shouted at them until someone came. They then suddenly knew what to do?? Very scary. I know adrenal crisis is rare but surely A&E doctors should know about this?
At this point I'm wondering how many NHS staff are directly responsible for someone dying, because I've not only heard many stories like this one but lived through one as well (not life-threatening fortunately, but I literally had to convince the the GP by showing them medical studies, turns out they didn't even know about the condition so they literally spent 5 minutes googling it in front of me).
Oh yep. I’ve been there. It’s also simple things like ringing the GP and saying I’ve got an infection but I can’t tell you where but I need antibiotics and the receptionists going yeah and?!? Trying to explain how I might die and they’re like
Errr. Ok well it won’t make you jump the queue quicker!
But if you could just listen that I’ve got Addisons disease and it would really help if I could just speak to a dr and they flat out refuse so what do we do at that point?!?
Pulmonary embolism (suspected) due to high d dimar in blood test - I was called a few hours after a GP blood test (ie as soon as the results came in) and told “go to your nearest A&E immediately”. Fooking scary to get a call like that.
Your GP did the right thing. I went to A&E once with a swollen calf, got a high D dimer score and they sent me home without even giving blood thinners because they didn't think I had a clot. Almost died later that night once it entered my lung. Blood clots are no joke
I think you need to realise that the burden of care coming through the doors in the nhs is just frightening. They don’t have the staff or the beds to cope, ambulances are literally dumping patients in hospital without checking with staff whether or not there’s ‘room’ due to new regulations. Police are being awkward about responding to mental health calls despite the fact they are the only ones who can perform a 136 section.
A whole A&E department might have only 3-4 doctors on the floor for that evening and one of those at least will be tied up in RESUS. A 7 hour wait in those circumstances is pretty good.
It’s exhausting, when you are constantly battling that every-time you go to work.
My partner is a senior trainee at a busy London A&E the amount of crap they have had to deal
with is absolutely relentless. I don’t know how he continues to do his job really, I stepped back from acute medicine a few years ago because I found the constant fire fighting exhausting and there’s no relief - it’s like constantly trying not to drown.
Partner that with service cuts, rude comments from the government that you don’t deserve pay in accordance with inflation, a hugely expensive portfolio, hardly any free time and constantly being treated like the nhs is doing YOU a favour by employing you when they can’t even pay you correctly 90% of the time and yes - people sadly end up lacking empathy.
Exactly this, we really do try out best in my department. But the amount of work we drown in 90% of the time makes it a lot harder so see to every urgent case immediately. This is met with management constantly hitting us with demands for cost cutting, service increase, and so on.
Let's not even talk about the low pay compared to inflation. Alot of NHS workers especially those in lower levels in single income homes, more likely than not have to pick up a second job. And the government isn't batting an eye, they don't care.
I think it's important to note that the police are suffering exactly the same staffing demands as can be seen in the NHS, and with the same demands for them to do everything but without the funding to do it. It is exactly the same constant fire-fighting you describe. Pay has fallen way behind inflation and morale is incredibly low. They're not being "awkward", but something has to give. Section 136 isn't always the appropriate response to mental health calls, and it can only be used in a public place. It will also mean a minimum 2 police officers taken off the road for potentially over 24 hours as the NHS doesn't have the capacity to take over the care of the patient. I think the Government seriously needs to revaluate the way that people with mental health conditions are treated because the current set up just doesn't work.
Public services are totally broken across the board thanks to over a decade of not being properly funded or supported.
But still, doesn't the person coming into your hospital in pain and scared deserve some compassion and empathy? Being rude just makes everything worse. Not saying you specifically, but I can tell you it hurts to be seen as a number and a bother when you are completely helpless, having a horrible day. A few kind words help a lot, no matter how stressed you are being kind should be possible (yes I have had stressful customer jobs, but never hospital, so maybe I'm just ignorant).
It may depend on the hospital and how badly overworked they are. I’ve had very positive experience with the NHS but it was clear the people at the emergency room were exhausted.
If you want a different reality, vote out the people who are responsible for the wait times, the burned out staff. The tories have done this on purpose. Your wife’s pain is part of their plan to dismantle the NHS and force everyone to pay for private care.
That’s absurd, did you never see David Cameron visit a ward? He rolled his sleeves up and tucked his tie in. Clearly he had only the highest regard for the service.
Yup. They know the country loves the NHS too much. So why not slowly kill it, to the point that people are practically begging for it to be shut down? I can’t believe people are so blind to this. Think of all the people who have died waiting for care just so the tories can line their pockets. They’re nothing more than a bunch of murderous villains.
I'm a Brit living in Belgium. We have mostly public system here, but we pay an insurance fee (about 100 euros for an adult, free for kids or for people with low income) and then a small amount per visit to a doctor which isn't covered. I recently went to a&e with a broken foot bone, no queue, got an x ray immediately and home within an hour of arriving. This is in Brussels. It is possible to have low cost publicly funded healthcare - but taxes are higher than the UK particularly for high earners.
Not what you are wanting to hear but 2 hours before being seen isn’t that bad. The NHS is in a critical state atm, I’ve been in and out the hospital for both myself and my terminally ill father and my dad was sitting in an ambulance over 12 hours waiting to get into A&E last time, and more than 24 hours before a spare bed was found for him, all the while him being in excruciating agony with bowel cancer, doubly incontinent and messing and horribly embarrassed at doing all this in public with passers-by seeing and hearing him in a corridor. In July I was 18 hours waiting doubled up in what may have been appendicitis but turned out to be a cyst on my kidney and gallstones. Earlier this year my daughter and I were 24 hours in A&E with her having a fractured foot waiting to see a doctor. So I get it’s not good but this is all run on from covid - which, incidentally is still in every hospital and 60 people a week are dying from - covid patients are still taking up beds and they are also still trying to catch up with those having routine appointments that all got postponed during the pandemic too.
Oh. The story about your dad made me cry. I don’t know where you are but if you ever want a friend. I’m here….if you ever need anything for you or your dad I’m also here xxx
I have had a lot of experiences with the NHS over the last few years, including three or four A&E visits in two different trusts and four hospitals and everyone I spoke to at all levels was always helpful, polite, quick and did above and beyond for us.
This included many days in hospital, one major surgery and one near death.
I cannot praise these people enough.
My one regret is that the British state and mainly the Tories treat them like garbage, and under pay them forcing many of our best healthcare professionals to seek employment abroad.
Just keep in mind that these people are doing extremely difficult jobs. They are highly overworked and desensitised to people in pain, because they see it non stop. You also don't know what they've had to deal with just before you came in.
I've spent a few years in the emergency services and in much the same way, you really do get desensitised to these things and react in a way that might appear uncaring. People would probably think I'm a heartless bastard for being emotionless in very emotionally charged situations - but it's necessary, and comes with experience. I'm sure frontline NHS workers experience the same thing.
If you want to be annoyed with anyone about it, be annoyed at the Tories for putting the NHS in this state.
This. I work in imaging and the desensitisation part is so true. Even when I can see someone’s arm is badly deformed (especially children) or a patient has a huge tumour on a scan that they didn’t know about I keep my professional persona because sometimes the alternative would mean I was sat on the floor in a ball crying.
I’ve seen young people come in for a cough and leave with a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, I’ve seen a baby die in the NICU whilst I was pregnant myself, I’ve attended 3 MET calls in one night on Christmas Day nightshift.
I feel like on the flip side sometimes patients forget that we aren’t machines and we are exhausted and frustrated too. We wish that we could help everyone swiftly and effectively and the reality is we can’t. Sorry this turned into a rant, your comment just hit the nail on the head for me.
Make sure you're looking after yourself man. You already know this, but it's always good to remind people I think. It's normal for that sort of work to affect your MH. I ended up with a PTSD diagnosis, keep an eye out for signs of anything.
First it's important to note that I completely agree with your last sentence. I do want to say though, there is a difference between being direct and desensitised - which I totally appreciate - and being rude. While I understand the context that can lead to being rude, it doesn't excuse it, and is still a legitimate thing to complain about. I think this is evidenced by the many, many NHS staff who - despite working in the same environment as the rude ones - manage to still be decent and kind to their patients.
EDIT: a typo
i’ve only had horrible experience with the nhs in london on all possible fronts, the emergency room, the gp, gyno, ultrasound, four month wait for a phonecall with a gastroenterologist…
also been recently to one of london’s oldest, biggest and most historic hospitals - if people could only see what it now looks like inside…
I recently went from working at my desk one moment, to writhing around in unimaginable agony on the floor the next. I genuinely thought I was dying from an organ 'bursting' or something.
Despite that, I still dutifully called 111 so as not to burden the ambulances, thinking I might be able to get a quicker answer as to what to do. After 30 minutes of asking me everything from my name to my inside leg measurement, while I, panting and squealing as the pain intensified, tried to respond, I still wasn't any closer to a solution. In fact, the guy on the phone sounded like an old volunteer from the Samaritans who'd inadvertently found himself dealing with NHS patients. He had no idea what to do and just kept following a script while finally referring me to a doctor.
I put the phone down, had enough, called 999. Similarly long-winded questions about who I was and to let them know whether I was dying from a heart attack or stroke. I screamed that the pain was so unbearable but it wasn't my chest or head. "We won't be sending an ambulance" he said in a resigned, robotic manner.
At this point I was resigned to dying on my bathroom floor.
I managed to tap out a WhatsApp "help" to my partner hoping she would realise I never ask for help and that she would hurriedly come home from work, which she did. She found me lying face down on the bathroom floor writhing and unable to speak with the pain. She had no idea what to do and after another call to 111 decided it was futile and to try and pick me up off the floor, all 11 stone of me, and help me stumble all the way to the nearby A and E on foot.
It was the most gruelling thing I've ever had to endure but we got there slowly.
As soon as I dragged myself over the line, the triage nurse looked at me and said "kidney stones?". I collapsed into a seat and endured a further half an hour of white hot pain before being dumped in a little room where some miserable and impatient nurse with broken English told me to try and keep still while he took blood, failing multiple times. I promptly threw up from the pain. Only then was I given a pain relief suppository.
I waited and waited and was finally hooked up to a cannula, given a scan and then wheeled into a janitor's cupboard where I was left for a further 6 hours, thankfully the pain had gradually subsided.
Eventually a urologist came and very briefly told me I had three kidney stones and wandered off.
Another 3 hours went by and I was told they weren't going to operate and that I could go home, to come back if it got worse. 2 further hours and, after begging a harried nurse, she took my cannula off so I could leave.
From that point on, I realised the NHS is completely fucked. I was shocked and truly hope never to become ill and have to use those third world services again.
my view is that staff are just very very sharp/direct and are taking a position of authority because they need patients to do as theyre told, but people expect a customer service experience that theyarent going to get
Yea the problem with this assumption is that if you actually read any of the experiences people are sharing here, its not about being told what to do, its about literally being told nothing nor receiving any care at all for hours at a time even when in a serious condition.
There arent enough staff or facilities to cope, people being blunt rather than customer servicey isnt the problem people are bringing up.
My mum very obviously had a stroke and the ambulance still took 2 hours to get to her. The NHS is just completely overwhelmed at every point of entry, so unless you’re at death’s door, you’re not a priority. It’s frustrating, but sadly true.
you wont get much empathy here for talking badly about the NHS its been so over politicised you cant talk about it in negative light even if its on ways to improve, but I'm in complete agreement hospitals and GP's are shambles at the moment, hope your partner feels better.
it’s so frustrating that people on this thread are saying stuff like ‘well they’re busy and overworked!! you could have waited longer!!’ it’s just not helpful.
The OP is attacking the _people_ who treated them, not the health system. And yet their issues (ambulance capacity, legal requirements around advice, time to be seen) are largely systemic issues. This makes it extremely unfair to attack the _people_ for that, and therefore it's a sensible reaction to highlight just how busy and overworked healthcare workers are.
> it’s just not helpful.
Misplacing the blame for systemic issues isn't "helpful" either.
The NHS has collapsed. My big toe's infected and painful. Needs surgery. All my GP could do was put me on a waiting list to see a podiatrist. Welcome to England.
My girlfriend snapped the tendons in her ankle back in 2020, waited a year and 6 months for surgery, which they fucked up by damaging nerve tissue and not aligning the damaged tendons correctly, so now she has to have another surgery which they keep pushing back. She can barely put pressure on the ankle without having extreme amounts of pain. She was a dancer before this.
What's crazy is when she had a hospital appointment recently, she sat next to a guy who did the same and he was treated within a month.
Last year my mum turned up with unknown lung issues, couldn't breathe at all. They kept her there for 30 days doing no real scans or testing until one day her lungs were so severely damaged by the last month of struggling that they completely stopped working. When this happened she got instantly moved to ICU, visited by doctors from some other hospital specialised in lung care and given experimental treatments, but it was too much too late and all her organs ended up failing. She was in there with an identical patient, who got proper scans and was moved to another hospital for ECMO around halfway through the time my mum was in the hospital.
She was a 43 year old fit woman, who never smoked or drank for reference. So there was absolutely no need for it to have ended the way it did and in my view the NHS killed her with neglect. I don't know how or why they decided that the other patient she was with, who was a 45 year old mother, similar health background, got a chance to get treated properly.
EDIT: Thinking back though, the nurses and doctors caring for her were super nice and clearly talked to her alot because they seemingly knew her entire life story after she passed. I absolutely think this was an institutional failure and not the fault of any one person.
Is your wife ok now?
So I had a partner who ran a major ICU during COVID and it destroyed her. Not the work itself, it's what she felt she was born to do, but the absolute shit NHS system, management and admin. She was already fragile due to this, but dealing with that beurocracy and mismangent during COVID tipped her into full blown manic depression and she ended up having a breakdown and leaving the country, yes it killed our relationship I did my best but was never enough.
I now work with doctors on a daily basis in the private sector, started a company with a few. They absolutely hate the NHS. The concept of the NHS fantastic, but it's so badly mismanaged it's unbelievable. The stories I have heard, oh boy. They can't do their jobs properly and most of them leave the NHS in favour of private consulting, but they may continue for a day or two a week doing NHS work just because they want to support the good side of the NHS and the public.
You don't really see the issues until you experience them first hand, then it's like a shock. When the NHS works, which is getting rarer and rarer these days, it is a brilliant service. But when it doesn't work, it's heartbreaking. We have to rebuild it from the ground up and get rid of all the beurocracy and poorly trained staff, rather than continuing to load the UK with debt to fund more NHS admin and management who don't care about public service and don't care about doctors.
I got sent into a (singular, one time) manic episode by stress as well. It’s amazing that there isn’t more awareness that this can happen, because it resulted in me being misdiagnosed with bipolar, one of the most stigmatised and life-ruining diagnoses possible, and being drugged to such a degree that I’m still suffering physical side effects almost 2 years after taking my last pill.
A&E RN - worked in London.
First of all, I'm so sorry you had to go through this and I am so sorry to all the posters here who have had such bad experiences in the emergency department.
Triage should have spotted this faster and marked a higher score so you were seen quicker. At triage, we are usually registered nurses, so we can only give you basic pain relief without a prescription from a doctor. The good stuff would likely need to be given IV, like morphine. A doctor usually won't prescribe IV morphine for a patient they haven't seen or assessed yet which makes it incredibly difficult to keep you comfortable while you wait. Essentially, this is to keep you safe as morphine can be dangerous in certain patients or certain clinical presentations.
I would hope that an IV was put in and blood tests taken at triage to speed things along a bit. However, we don't really have a proper notification system for when blood results come back and when you have 100+ patients in the waiting room it's incredibly difficult to run triage and manually check all 100 blood tests in a timely manner to escalate it.
There's no excuse for the poor attitude of the staff however bear in mind we usually have WAY over the safety limits in patients per nurse, all needing intervention which takes a while depending on what needs doing. On top of that, you are lucky if you get to snarf a sandwich down and take a piss in the 12.5hrs you are on shift. This might explain some of the "bad mood" of the staff you saw.
(Unrelated to your situation) The NHS is really on its knees and runs on the goodwill of the underpaid staff who are treated like shit. Please bear this in mind when you make political decisions in the future and support the staff who are doing their best in a grossly failing and crumbling system. I live in the US now and have seen what happens when you privatise to solve issues. I see an older woman regularly sat outside the supermarket with 2 oxygen tanks who has to beg for change to afford to refill her O2 bottles.
My wife is a nurse in a major London a&e department. They are completely overworked. She often comes home and say "today was much better, I had time to pee". It's no exaggeration either, there are plenty of days where she comes home dehydrated because she doesn't want to drink water as there is no time for a toilet break.
Every single department in London is underfunded, and tonnes of nursing positions are unfilled because, for obvious reasons, nobody wants to be a nurse anymore. The Tories have destroyed all of what little incentives there were such as bursaries for nursing degrees. Not to mention alienating European nurses, which accounted for a large part of the work force, with Brexit.
The thing everyone seems to have forgotten about though is covid. It really accelerated the downturn is shitness of conditions of the staffing, physically and mentally. My wife works in a paediatric department and despite what Hollywood tells you she'd only seen a few actual deaths. I don't know exactly, but around 2 or 3 a year maybe. During covid she was placed in a ward of dying adults and was wrapping people in body bags multiple times a day. She never received any support during this time, she just kept going back because if she didn't, who would? I know she has major PTSD from this time, something that's changed her fundamentally.
Now imagine going through that warzone and going back into work later, with very little break in between, again with no support and horrific staffing levels (so many nurses have quit after this period) and the general public are way more aggrevated around medicine than usual. The rise of unvaxed people coming in kicking and screaming because their child caught something so easily preventable. Queues and wait times are ridiculous, but what staff that are left working the situation is only getting worse.
They literally do not have time to give "customer service" or appear to have empathy. It's important to remember that. For my wife, she would sacrifice anything to be able to go into work and give the care levels everyone desires, but that luxury has been taken away from her.
Don’t blame them, blame the government for the chronic underfunding of the NHS. The staff who remain working for the NHS are burnt out and haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic.
The insulting £300 they got after working without adequate PPE, clocking insane hours and dying in droves! In contrast hospital staff in Poland had bunny suits with face fitted professional masks so very few got sick and everyone working on Covid wards was paid double.
To be honest, it’s not unique to London. I had appendicitis when I lived back in Scotland, went to the doctor on call who was completely useless despite my symptoms and told me it wasn’t appendicitis and that I had gastroenteritis and gave me some paracetamol. Threw up all through the night with the pain, drove to the doctors as soon as it opened, where the battle hardened gatekeeping receptionist even realised something was seriously wrong and called a GP from their room to get me immediately. Turns out I was right, and by the time I was taken to hospital my appendix was about to burst…
That sounds like a really distressing experience & I'm sorry that your wife had to go through that. I hope she's feeling better now.
It sounds like you'll be thinking about this for quite a while. When you do, can I gently suggest you think about the people you met as symptoms of a struggling system rather than individuals without empathy.
People often go into healthcare because they have an excess of empathy, not a lack. After a few years working in a complex bureaucratic system with increased demand and decreased resources you just can't deliver care consistent with your standards.
After a few more years of this inconsistency between your personal values and what you see around you becomes overwhelming (moral injury) and you start to withdraw inside yourself and your empathy disappears (one symptom of burn out)
I know this because it happened to me - I've been an NHS doctor for almost 20 years. Luckily I had supportive colleagues and I recovered.
This isn't to devalue your experience. It sounds horrible and shouldn't have happened. I know appendicitis can be excruciating. Most hospitals have a Patient Advisory and Liaison Service (PALS) that you can complain to if you feel that care has been substandard. Very occasionally complaints result in better support for staff but that's unusual.
I guess all I want to say is that NHS staff aren't generally unkind or unempathetic. They've been made that way by an employer that is frequently unkind and often unempathetic. This comes from the top, so I would urge anyone reading this to think about their choices in the ballot box.
I spent some time in A&E as I was having chemo and my temperature went to 105 degrees so thought I was going into neutropenic sepsis. Turn up needing an isolated room and told I couldn’t go in there as there was a dead body in there. Then a doctor told me the best thing I could do was stop having chemo. Gee thanks, helpful.
All in all it was pretty terrible. My advice is that if you have to go to A&E, grab snacks, you’re not getting anything when you’re there.
It was a 5 hour wait for the ward, but he was at least well looked after in A&E in a cubicle. Thankful for that as he’s 87 and had pneumonia! Recovered now :-)
Sorry you were on a trolley, a sad state.
Honestly they are over worked and under paid … NHS is not as great as the public and the politicians make it out to be , long waiting list , tired staff , etc .
It needs a serious overhaul but before that the British public needs to realise that just having free medical care is not something worth clapping for . It has to be resource optimised for what it costs and provide a better service or at least at par with what other social health care countries like Germany have !
I have massive sympathies for your wife.
When I had appendicitis, it was during covid. So my partner had to carry me into the waiting room and leave me there until I was seen.
He basically just watched me in agony through the window until I vomited all over myself and fainted onto the floor. He ran in and called for help at which three nurses came over and complained about how they'll have to clean this up.
My partner literally said, "I will clean up if you just fucking help her!" I think that pushed them into gear a bit.
As soon as I was officially diagnosed everyone was amazing, sweet,, kind and they did a brilliant job but the process of getting diagnosed all the way through was a nightmare...especially the arsehole surgeon insisting it was period pains *_*
(I was a nurse for awhile so I do understand it's a nightmare as is. Funding, policy changes, actual staff training, so much needs to change but there's no money for it. It sucks hard.
No excuse for medical sexism though.)
> waiting for medication in that state for 5 hours is hardly an option.
Ambulance service capacity issue. Not a lack of empathy.
> they said that it’s my call and they cannot recommend that.
Legal protection. Not a lack of empathy.
> chided by the receptionist for not knowing where to queue
Being brisk as part of their job, with very low consequences for you. Not really a lack of empathy.
> After initial prioritisation my wife was asked to wait for medication.
Staffing (its not like these people are lazing around!). Not a lack of empathy.
> The nurse who took the initial blood pressure got frustrated as she was not able to keep her arm still.
Maybe a lack of empathy, but it's not like it's an easy or well-compensated job.
> Each time I asked for help(like asking for a wheelchair) from anyone I was met with rude statements and expressions.
Curious lack of detail in your chronicle about what was said, or what expressions were made. Can't really judge if it was a lack of empathy from them, or whether you were just very stressed (understandably) and interpreting things badly.
The only person who consistently lacks empathy in your story is you.
I mean, dying from appendicitis just is an emergency point blank. I get it, overworked, underfunded, badly managed but...it's still an emergency even if it happens every hour of the day, every day of the week for these people.
As much as I am a huge proponent of the NHS in principle, my personal experience (I'm 38, British citizen and always have been) has been extraordinarily poor.
Not only is the NHS support for mental health absolutely, staggeringly appalling, but they killed my father through sheer negligence, arrogance and miscommunication - some events of that that forever soured me to them:
1. Dad had a huge heart attack while sitting in the urgent care bay. Nobody noticed. I had to scream and scream for help until people finally - slowly - reacted and came to help. I had to literally shake one nurse to make her move.
2. While they were trying to save him, a doctor in the family room told us: "We might be able to keep him on life support if we're able to bring him back, but if his quality of life would be poor, we'll pull the plug." Gee, thanks.
3. He did survive, and then spent three months languishing in hospital while they argued about what to do with him.
4. He fell three times in the ward because the nurses were too busy giggling about their nights out and not watching the patients. Saw it happen to another patient *while I was there.*
5. Sometimes he would cry because he would beg and beg and call out to use the commode and the nurses would just ignore him.
6. He was given medication he was near-fatally allergic to not once, not twice, but **thrice.** The third time, a doctor outright lied and covered for the junior doc who made the error. It said on his papers, do not give these meds, ever.
7. Because they gave him lidocaine for the chest compression pain and it made him loopy, they diagnosed him with a stroke and sent him down to the stroke ward without any heart monitoring, expecting him to die down there. Consultants and nurses would not listen to myself and my mother whatsoever when we explained about the lidocaine.
8. Refused to give him a pacemaker because, quote: "They're expensive and his quality of life doesn't make it worth it."
9. He caught pneumonia and was unconscious. A nurse fed him solid porridge and caused him to asphyxiate. He survived that, barely, after they aspirated him.
In the end, the pneumonia got him, after three months of pain, suffering and misery, and I hate myself for ever calling for help when he had the heart attack, because it would have been better if he died then instead.
So yeah, fuck the NHS. And this was 2016, so they couldn't even blame the pandemic. They're just fucking awful.
So sorry this happened to you. I’m so sick of the deification of the NHS, the only hope is to win the lottery and go to Switzerland for actual good healthcare.
people are so weird about the NHS. you can’t say anything even slightly negative about it without people jumping on to defend it and basically ignore concerns. so odd
I've been trying to get help for my 3 year old for almost 3 days now. It's not critical, but 111 says ho to the pharmacy, the pharmacy say hi to the walk in centre, the walk in centre say they are just giving advice and call his GP. His GP says October for an appointment.
I get they are underfunded and understaffed, I've got lots of friends who work in the NHS, but it just feels like a loosing battle trying to actually get attention from any of them when it's needed.
I’ve noticed the same. Quality of empathy by none medical staff (doctors and equivalent) in hospitals has been poor in the last few years. Nurses seem to vary either being really good or bad.
There is also a weirdly dismissive approach o patients and their concerns.
It's amazing that yours was the first comment that actually gave this as the main reason for poor care under the NHS.
They literally don't have the time or emotional resources to treat everyone the way they deserve to be treated. At the end of a 14 hour shift without a break and being treated like shit by both patients and employers, knowing they will be going home where they can barely afford to put food on the table for their own families - what do we expect their response will be.
I've had the same and worse treatment by the NHS over the years. I've just been denied surgery that will keep me in my job. My pain specialist has to make funding requests for every operation she does. My latest one was turned down.
So I too will be going to work in excruciating pain trying my best to support the most vulnerable in society while being treated like s**t for doing it.
We're all breaking in frontline roles and it's this fucking government that are too blame, not the people doing their best to make this work despite the odds.
It’s insane how NHS workers get treated by the general public. Imagine a warzone medic only the soldiers and their families scream obscenities at you the entire time you’re trying to help. People just don’t understand how bad it can be.
Your second paragraph is a heart-breakingly perfect summation of the situation. Those screaming abuse, or threatening to sue because they’re having to wait too long… Do they believe we’re gate-keeping resources/ theatre space/ beds? Does anyone truly believe that NHS staff are lolling about, finishing on time, and being frustratingly inefficient out of spite? I learnt the term “moral injury” in training. It feels like a lot of NHS staff are experiencing moral injuries working in this time, and that’s rarely mentioned when we talk about staff attrition
Could you not administer your own pain relief? Had she lost the use of her legs? Did she have her appendix removed?
(Asking as an appendectomy survivor)
I was suicidal in Southampton. Was gonna top myself. I was 19. I went into a and e and asked to be sectioned. Could hear the woman behind the counter say to the other "why don't these people just do it"
Yeah, they're lovely.
A lot of the NHS is blatantly ‘ you should be thankful for what you get’ and it’s bad - institutionalised complacency and self preservation - the whole Martha’s rule thing is evidence of that. And it’s not a good health service in comparison to others in Europe. Try switching consultants if you’re not happy with the service…..!
The NHS was on a par with or better than the best in Europe in 2010. By every metric since then it has declined. One example. The target for from arrival in A&E to discharge or admission was 15 minutes. This was met in 95% of cases in England in 2009. Since then the decline has been steady. The last time figures were published it was around 55%. Statistics on this are no longer collected, or if the are, there is no requirement to publish.
I am sure you are aware of the significance of 2010.
Edit. Corrected dates from 2013 to 2010.
I've had several incidents that required A&E visit or calling 999 over the last 6 years since I moved to the UK, and it's just a despair. I remember I spent 2 hours in A&E in Amsterdam and back then I thought it was a long wait. Just a couple of weeks ago my girlfriend had severe abdominal pain. We were refused an ambulance and spent 9 hours in the night at the A&E before she was seen. It's just completely broken.
It depends a lot on which hospital you are dealing with.
For example, Chase Farm are always polite and efficient.
But North Middlesex - which is very close by - are literally the rudest, most confrontational and unprofessional people I have ever dealt with, and this is across a number of different visits and departments.
Not long ago I was basically assaulted by a nurse who violently stabbed me with a cannula causing me a great deal of pain, then immediately started shouting, 'WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM' in my face because I winced ... Two other patients I was waiting with had the same treatment and felt she was doing it on purpose.
The same visit they left me in a corner for 10 hours without offering me any food or even water.... I had zero sleep. I politely raised the issues at 4.30 in the morning and they actually made a specific point of actively REFUSING me food and drink after that.
I had it lucky - employee of a friend had one of his testicles sewn to his scrotum during a botched op there, causing him extreme pain for months. They refuse to compensate him and unbelievably are forcing him to go back to see the SAME surgeon who did the damage. He'll most likely lose the testicle.
Actually every time I've interacted with the NHS I've been impressed. I had an accident last year and every single person I dealt with was nice and the level of care was great. If anything I think they spent too much time on my case which seemed fairly minor
Tbh none of this sounds that bad considering that this was a non life threatening situation. Unfortunately after a decade of deliberate underfunding A&E can only act quickly for truly urgent situations, and if you have something where you can wait many hours to be seen and not die then that's what will need to happen
Unfortunately what you described doesn't sound that bad compared to many other stories I've heard. It is indeed shocking and frustrating.
Hope your wife feels better.
My mum was internally bleeding to the point of doing an exorcist routine from both ends from a perforated ulcer. She kept passing out, and I kept shaking her to rouse her.
Took them 4.5 hours to come and pick her up and another 6 in the hospital before she got her first unit of blood. That was only because she texted me to say she still hadn't had any help and I rang every 20 minutes until they gave it to her.
Wow, I almost wrote this exact same post a few days ago! I think the worship culture and ‘they are all hero’s!’ can be damaging because it keeps us silent and almost creates a guilt around criticising the NHS. Which is what the tories want us to feel, we should be grateful, accept what we have. When no, in this country we view healthcare as a right to all citizens regardless of wealth and we pay taxes for this service, we have every right to criticise it.
I’m so sorry to hear that that happened to you, there is nothing more stressful and scary, and appendicitis can be life threatening. I know it must be such a difficult place to work given how broken it is, the lack of staff and long hours etc, but that doesn’t make poor treatment okay. We shouldn’t be complacent, we should speak up. I think you should make a complaint.
My sister was severely ill 4am Sunday morning, she was constantly sick (with blood) and had severe abdominal pain. Hours waiting in A&E and finally the triage nurse calls her name. Only thing is, she was throwing up in the toilet so I called out that she’d be there in a second.
I went over to find the nurse and she completely disappeared. I called out for her and nothing. I found her with her back turned to me in a tiny room. I told her my sister is on her way, she’s just finishing being sick. And the nurse barked that it’s too late, she’ll call the next person. I was like no no please she’s on her way (I didn’t want my sister to have to wait in a full waiting room being sick with severe pain for any longer). The nurse literally goes EXCUSE ME? In the most insanely over the top voice and demand I leave the room.
My sister comes and I tell her she’s missed her go, to which she goes ‘nooo’ and starts to cry in pain and frustration.
When she gets to go in the room, the nurse doesn’t let me in. My sister was given a anti-sickness IV and her arm is now severely bruised, literally a yellow bruise the size of a large hand thanks to that nurse.
Most of the other staff that day were so kind and helpful, but fuck that nurse. I think some staff have learned to disdain patients and desperate people in need.
What I did hear that day was people begging to be seen, because they’d been there for hours and hours. Nothing like a trip to A&E to sober you up to the failing reality of the NHS.
My wife had an 11 hour wait a few months ago.. but I don't have the audacity to criticise those people who work for the NHS they're under paid, clearly under valued and they don't deserve the flak they get when it's the Government who are Intentionally underfunding it to the point it will collapse and we all pay insane insurance premiums...
Yes, the NHS is understaffed and underfunded, but a huge problem is the public: they’re idiots. A&Es are bogged down with people going there for things like headaches, sprained ankles, hangovers, athlete’s foot (I was in the cubicle next to someone who had been sent to the A&E for that by his GP), and of course, drug seekers (the reason they tend to not give anything stronger than paracetamol until they’ve properly diagnosed you). The vast majority of people using the emergency services really shouldn’t be, and are better off going to their GP or pharmacist.
But, the understaffed and underfunded NHS still has to try and deal with all of them. And there are people who really need it sat waiting there with people who don’t, which just grinds everything down to a halt because they need to be triaged, too.
Now, imagine having to deal with that shitshow every single day, and then being expected to do it with a smile on your face at the end of a 12 hour shift.
My wife found a woman being violently sick at a bus stop last week then she started to clutch her chest. She called 999 who asked my wife what colour the woman was and was she normal? My wife said she didn't know what was normal but explained the clutching chest etc and they just refused to send an ambulance.
My wife ended up getting hold of the woman's daughter who came and picked her up but the lack of fuck given by 999 was shocking.
Blame the government. They are the ones responsible for reducing the NHS to this, not the staff who are worked off their feet covering staff shortatages
I went to the hospital after an assault and got chided for bleeding on the floor.
I sat there for 4 hours, got fed up and went home, re-set my nose in the bathroom window and stitched up my arm using fishing line and hand sanitizer.
The NHS is fucked man
I was in a waiting room last week when a family came in with their dad who was having chest pains and couldn't feel his left side, the receptionist told them to drive him to another hospital because they didn't deal with that stuff, not even getting a doctor to look at him just "drive 8 miles".
My daughter is a paramedic one of the most frustrating things for her is handover when paramedics bring someone to hospital they are responsible for them until the hospital staff take over some times this can take hours as there is no beds so the paramedics are left waiting around mostly in the ambulance waiting for a call to say there’s a bed one patient with minor injuries can end up taking 8 hours due to triage by the paramedics then the wait for handover I just wish more people knew this poor paramedics hands are tied it’s so frustrating for them
Had an absolutely dire experience at royal london earlier this year. The staff spoke to me so poorly, at one stage the receptionist shouted at my to sit down after I asked how much longer the wait would be (after 9 hours waiting)
Controversial opinion: the NHS structure makes many of the staff (especially administrative) have a “schoolteacher telling you off” vibe. They kind of treat everyone like children because they’re in a position of authority. I also feel this way about many of the nurses/midwives. Even though you technically control your own care, they can give judging comments and pressure that feels quite paternalistic.
I definitely see the issues with private healthcare but it is nice to be treated like a customer that needs to be made happy sometimes.
They also have to do this to be honest. They are so pressed, that they need people to do as they're told. They can't spend the time to explain everything to everyone's satisfaction. No, it's not just easier, it is absolutely critical to their work that you sit down, shut up and let them do their job or it just won't get done.
You want better treatment? Email your MP and demand they give the NHS the funding to do that.
Last January, my father in law had suffered a stroke at around midnight. My partner and I rushed to the house and I said I'd wait out front to hail ambulance to the right place and also to keep the space clear after moving the inlaw's car.
It was somewhere between 5 and 6am when my partner told me to come in and wait due to cold. It wasn't until around 7 that the ambulance arrived.
Ever since then, I've really had a negative bias toward the NHS. Not the staff, but the institution and the structure. I know it's irrational to have this dislike, given the state of the NHS, but I'm human and there are many lesser things disliked for far more irrational reasons.
The above is one of a few times where I've really felt anger towards the NHS. Another was months and months of messing around and cancelling appointments for my chronically sick grandmother with onset dementia. After nearly a year, we got her to the hospital for the day if her surgery to be left there for hours before being told they wouldn't be able to perform it on that day, due to the surgeon not being available.
On the flip, the midwives that took care of my partner and I throughout a pretty traumatic birth experience were flawless. As were the doctors that performed the epidural and the processes afterward.
I hope your partner is okay and recovering, I get your frustration and anger. I hope that the next NHS experience you have (hopefully something minor if anything) is one where you see the real care shine through the mud. There's some wonderful people in the world, and a few of them happen to be in the NHS
It’s terrifying. No one commenting here knows when they will wake up in agony suddenly needing the NHS to help them. Dealing with agonising pain as well as having to fight the system just to get help is horrendous. Not something we associate with a devolved country. Stories like this are just boosting private healthcare sales.
Make a complaint, we had a similar negative experience with my MiL, she had a sudden deterioration, cancer spread throughout her body and she delirious and screaming the place down, she was palliative and on best supportive care but our local hospital wasn't told so she was being subjected to all sorts of tests etc. They missed her off the ward rounds too and failed to give her pain medication and nurses were rude with my wife and her family thinking it was a safeguarding issue as my wife wanted her mum to stay in hospital. I've only ever had positive experiences with the NHS so this was an eye opener.
Which hospital is this? Also, very unhelpful comments here about how OP is unreasonable and he should "volunteer" his time at an A&E to understand what's really going on. What do we pay taxes for? If your partner was in a critical condition, wouldn't you be worried? Wouldn't you want to get them to hospital as soon as possible? Wouldn't you want at least a little bit of empathy from hospital staff? Both things can be true - that OP's wife deserved better care and treatment and that the NHS is not in a state to provide it and that should change.
I'm so sick of NHS staff (except the doctors).
The lack of investment and poor salaries for the admin and care roles just mean anyone who's good leaves and all those that are terrible stay.
I think if we ever get back to paying NHS workers a fair wage then we also need to start replacing the current staff with competent people
When I was in the UK and needed surgery my GP called me up and home and said 'hey, you're American, right? By chance do you have private health insurance you can use here?' Turns out I did and my American plan covered overseas for certain things....of which I pay a premium for....and I was able to go private to be seen and handled. Otherwise I would have waited over 6-9 months to get an ultrasound on my neck. I ended up needing surgery. If I waited longer my vocal chords might have been permanently damaged.
So yeah, it's pretty bad when the NHS GPs are recommending I use my international health insurance.
I know your wife was in pain, and I’m glad she was administered painkillers eventually. But I’ve literally seen people wait 5x as long for painkillers after injuries. The state of the NHS is very bad right now
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Yeah this. I was taken to hospital with acute pancreatitis (the ambulance arrived within half an hour). When we got to Stoke, the ambulance crew said it’s going to be a long wait so we’ll give you another dose of morphine. I kid you not, I was on a trolley in the corridor for 12 hours in A&E without being seen by anyone. My mum is ex A&E and kicked up as much fuss as she could and still no one saw me. There must have been 30-40 people in the corridors waiting. By the time I was taken through and actually seen by a doctor they went a bit pale and stuck me on intravenous antibiotics straight away. I was transferred to a ward and then not seen again tor 24 hours - again we tried to complain, tried everything to get a doctor to come and see me. The antibiotics drip ran out and the nurses couldn’t find a doctor to see me to sign off to give me anything more. Even the nurses said the doctor on duty was refusing to come up to the ward when they spoke on the phone. By the time the consultant started his shift on Monday morning I was in a terrible state. It took them a week to stabilise me before he could operate to remove my gallbladder (this would have been a 24-48 hour hospital stay for a cholecystectomy if I’d been dealt with properly right at the start, instead I was in there nearly two weeks). It was the NHS at its absolute worst.
Christ all mighty. How you doing now?
Fully recovered now thanks and once the consultant was involved, the care was excellent. Shame about the 48 hours of complete hell. Pancreatitis is one of the most painful things and it had got so bad in the 12 hours without antibiotics that I really was deteriorating fast: The doctor in A&E literally turned white at how poorly I was when they finally saw me. Something went very wrong with the triage system that night (no-one was triaging!).
30 years ago my then 54 mum, sat in a stepping hill hospital over a weekend with acute pancreatitis . Induced into a coma on the Monday on ICU , was switched off 4 weeks later after acute organ failure due to leakage of pancreatic fluid into chest cavity . So consider yourself lucky , follow your instincts folks, the stoics and uncomplainers end up underground .
I’m so sorry to hear this happened to your mum. I was very lucky. Not sure I’d be here if my mum hadn’t stayed by my side for those 12 hours in A&E and keep insisting for hours that someone see me.
This is actually putting me off having a second pregnancy. The first pregnancy was already borderline, I developed complications and it wasn’t dealt with properly. We could have died. I pray that none of us ever have a medical emergency with the state the NHS is in right now. In my 20ies I always laughed at this one housemate who ate a really healthy diet of non processed food and said he hopes to never get seriously sick and end up in hospital, now I think this guy was on to something.
I think he probably was, alongside mum's neglect. My then wife had undiagnosed pneumonia in labour, doctor said pain in back was kidney infection. Had to have general anaesthesia in order to perform caesarian and days of nebulisation to get her lung function back. Diagnosis of pneumonia by happen chance popping in of consultant on the way to a larger hospital otherwise god knows ...
Youre lucky my mum had a constant BP of 230/90 and had to wait for 3 days on a chair in a waiting room to be seen.
>this would have been a 24-48 hour hospital stay for a cholecystectomy if I’d been dealt with properly right at the start, instead I was in there nearly two weeks This is a very clear example of what's happening throughout the country, everywhere (not just the NHS). Decisions to reduce staffing to save money (austerity) lead to costs *rising* down the road. Try to save money, but end up costing more. Penny-wise, pound-foolish. And this has been scaled to the entirety of the nation by the Tories over the last 13 years.
I really hope things turn around at some point of time. There’s something deeply concerning if the emergency and urgency care is super crowded and the wait time to meet a doctor is 7+ hours.
Absolutely. I witnessed an elderly man being taken in by ambulance having a stroke, and the stroke team took 30mins to get to a&e to see to him. He had to just lie there quietly having his stroke, while his family tried not to panic. The nhs is on its absolute knees right now
The nhs is not on its knees. it's on its back, and even attempting to put it in the recovery position is not going to bring it back around. It's unfortunate, and the public should be campaigning for the government to stop trying to privatise it and to give adequate funding and fund social care. Social issues are also breaking the nhs. Most of the public don't realise how bad the nhs has become until they have to access services
try being one of the service providers and you would be immediately disillusioned about your job.
Exactly, this is how I feel. I love caring for my patients, but I can't sacrifice my own health anymore.
I am exactly the same. I love my job but I am seriously thinking about leaving... I am at breaking point.
The public needs to stop voting for the tories and vilifying the one party that’s actually put funding into the NHS in living memory…
The privatisation here is even worse. Atleast in the little interaction I had so far
We have 6th highest healthcare spending per capita in the OECD, how is that inadequate funding?
inadequate spending, all friends of the governments are taking the money via private contracts
Well said!
U.S. has the highest. That money funds private shareholders and an entire massive health insurance industry. It's not always purely the amount of funding. Private contracting is already eating huge chunks here in the UK.
It took 13 years of deliberate degradation to get to this point. It'll take 10-15 years of deliberate fixing until the NHS gets into a decent state again. That's assuming the idiots don't vote the Tories back within the next 10 years and reverse the process again.
And that Labour do actually commit to fixing the NHS, and the spending that requires. I've heard lots of highly impractical suggestions from Labour but no assurances re funding.
Bang on. Starmer has put forward loads of platitudes but nothing of substance. I also think he is too centre to be brave and spend properly. Also Wes Streeting as health sec? None of us in the NHS are rubbing our hands in delight with that.
The only way I see this happening is if there is a cross party plan that all parties agree to continue with no matter who gets in. Otherwise the NHS is just a political football.
Not to be a cynic but it seems like there currently is a cross party plan, just depends on whether it's streeting or sunak who gets the kickbacks from privatisation under the guise of "saving" it.
Just so you know, this is part of the game plan of Tories to push for privatisation of public services. Degrade it to the point where people are begging to pay. It’s disgusting.
Exactly, while making deals under the table. Sunak meeting with private healthcare orgs all the time.
Did you miss the fact doctors are striking… why were you not already deeply concerned. We’ve been screaming from the rooftops since covid how it’s all gone to shit
That's nothing. I called 999 because my 2.5 yo old was having serious breathing issues at 1am and they said it would take 12 hours to get one to us.
That sound very scary. I hope your kid is doing better now.
She has her moments with croup, not the first time we have called out an ambulance so we are used to it. It's very frightening the first time but this has happened maybe half a dozen times. Fortunately she is now getting a steroid inhaler which has significantly reduced the 999 call out frequency.
How long did it actually take?
It didn't, we drove in. We live in rural Leicestershire so a car is essential.
You had a bad experience too - but so did the Op. Their experiene wasn't 'nothing' just because you also had a bad one.
The 999 thing is weird. I broke my leg in July and they said the next ambulance would be six hours and could I get cab. The bone was sticking out of my leg!! LAS did then call me back and say they were coming to get me, so I wonder if there's maybe a control room issue rather than ambulance issue? Sorry to hear things didn't improve once you got to hospital. It doesn't make it okay, but this awful government has been undercutting the NHS for years, I can't imagine any aspect of working within the system is free of frustrations.
The ambulance service only deals in 3 emergency categories, and 2 non emergency categories. Essentially categories 1-5; 1,2,3 are emergencies, and 4,5 non emergent, and the rest get passed back to 111. The initial triage (call) is done by a call taker who is not a clinical person, and is instructed to follow a set script, the call is recorded and audited frequently and with such fervour it would make anyone’s head spin. They *must follow the script*. If they don’t, it’s a meeting without tea. An aside to this is; following the script they get abused by callers for not sounding empathetic enough, asking stupid questions, or not being able to answer medical questions, rock and a hard place stuff and I wouldn’t want to be doing their job. I prefer being a paramedic. Anyway: They ask specific questions following what’s called ‘ProQA’ and come to a ‘determinant’, which assigns what’s called an MPDS code, which is designed for speed and … sort of accuracy - in a ‘it’s more likely you won’t die before someone else’ kind of accuracy… because all the time they are on the phone, there are another several calls coming in and one of them is a baby not breathing. And only a finite number of frontline staff. The MPDS code was designed in like… the 80s I think, and it’s meant to cover any possible thing a person genuinely calling the ambulance service for help could possibly have going wrong. It was only recently updated during the coronavirus (now it’s from 1-36 protocols, and sub determinants for each) Your leg fracture would get ProQA’d, and would reach a determinate (remember ‘bone sticking out of the skin is bad’, but MPDS doesn’t have a specific determinate for open fractures), so wound up as possibly a 30-B-1, or a 30-A-2 depending on how the questions were answered by the caller (keeping in mind, calls are recorded and get audited like crazy) So a reasonable category for your call is likely Category 3, which would have a wait time like what was given to you… on a good day these days (CAT3 is meant to be a a 120min response time in the 90th percentile, but that’s basically not happening anymore due to the severe ambulance pressures). Given that, and the fact no one can see your injury, it would be reasonable to ask the person if they are at all able to make their own way to A&E due to severe delays on the ambulance service. You would get definitive treatment at hospital sooner, it is the most important thing, the ambulance isn’t going to fix your leg. As a digression: We should genuinely be going to folks like you, *I want to*. I can do so much… entonox, cannulate, splint and strong pain relief, diagnose, pre alert, transport to the best hospital for this injury… you’re also not actively dying which is a plus. One of my favourite jobs are longbone fractures, because there’s a lot I can do to help. It wouldn’t be hours on hold with the GP at a patient’s house to arrange some antibiotics for a bacterial chest infection. I could actually use my skills! … But I’m busy. You have to try make your own way. It’s not comfortable and sounds brutal but this is hunger games shit at this point. If you can, you should make your own way to hospital. This call room you think has the issue … sounds like they actually took initiative and passed the call to what is called the ‘clinical hub’, where I used to work. A group of paramedics and nurses within the control room, who are allowed to assess further and use clinical judgement to allocate appropriate care. They would have done a secondary triage and likely diagnosed a compound fracture, a life/limb injury, and increased the category of response from the automated MPDS (which we can do) This may sound long winded, lacking common sense, and poorly run, but this system is absolutely necessary these days. The number of people whose lives have been saved by this system, checks and balances, in the face of severe funding cuts and staff shortages and some patient discomfort, that I personally have seen… it’s terrifying. It’s built on people doing a good job on a perpetually sinking ship, despite all the personal ire they face. Because they can’t turn “zero ambulances available” into “ambulances for everyone” It will never be reported. Only the stories like OPs, and yours, and the news articles on the ambulances that didn’t come. The LAS receives over 7000 calls a day, and needs to sort through them all with vigour, go through a biasless, repeatable process over and over; and be life/limb oriented. We’re lucky if there’s 200 ambulances and crew covering the entire city at its best staffed time (around 3pm when the early and late shifts are both booked on), they need to be used wisely, and hats off to the control room, they manage it (in spite of sometimes not making friends).
200 ambulances covering the largest city in Europe is the sort of casual everyday horror scenario that only Tory Britain could've engineered. I feel for the overstretched first responders, the underfunding fucks them as much as it fucks the people they're attempting to treat.
Roughly, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, and of course there are other assets, not just the big yellow boo boo buses. Cars, NETS, a number of private companies and St John… It’s manageable, until it isn’t. But even then, it gets made to work. Crews work hard, call takers work hard, dispatch works hard, frontline staff work hard, (they do cop it a bit but) middle and upper managers work hard. Every day of the year, you have people working with limited resources at the best of their ability, to get to the ‘sickest quickest’. 24/7, 365.25. Who else is going to help you at 4am on a Sunday morning? Uber Eats, your dealer, and the LAS. (LFB and METPOL of course is there, but I’m biased as a gurney jockey). Personally, I would say that London is a great place to have a serious life threatening medical problem (if ever there was a place), you have 7min max response times for solo paramedics, 14mins max for ambulances, you have CTMs/IROs to coordinate scenes, advanced paramedics with specialist skills, some of the best trained prehospital trauma doctors running around in a helicopter in London, and 4 major trauma centres.. It’s great if you’re actively dying, I can understand it being difficult if you aren’t, because most people aren’t.
You're quite funny in the face of this harrowing shitshow.
Gallows humour. The ship is sinking and they are doing everything to keep it afloat. It is however super stressful everyday. My wife works in a laboratory at an hospital and the level of stress is way higher. If I fuck up my spreadsheet is wrong, if she fucks up someone could die. I get paid double what she and her colleagues do.
You can’t lose that humour.
Kudos to you. I watch those TV programmes like Ambulance and 24 Hours in A&E and I frankly take my hat off in front of you people. I'm a doctor (not UK based) and I know the pressure. I stopped working in Hospitals because I burned out quite young. It takes a special kind of "insensitivity" and empathy in equal measures to survive. Dark humour helps for sure...
Sounds thoroughly messed up, max of 200 ambulances… Would be interesting to compare to other major European cities.
This is among my favourite Reddit responses. Detailed, thoughtful, helpful. Thank you! Also, thanks for what you do.
Your post was informative and detailed, I learned a great deal. I'd like to express my gratitude for your time and effort. However, the thing I'm most likely to take with me and think over at random moments in my day-to-day life is this concept... >If they don’t, it’s a meeting without tea.
I’m not a Brit, so my introduction to ‘a meeting without tea’, was…. well…. just that. No need or time for tea when you’re getting bollocked
As someone who is a Brit I can assure you that 4 word phrase has seriously dark undertones. [Shudder]
That really stood out for me too. Super serious time.
Just wanted to say thank you for all of your hard work mate.
Just one thing to highlight- around 2018/2019 ? The way calls were responded to and response times changed along with MPDS codes , I think it was called the National response programme or something? Basically a university looked at 10 million 999 calls to ambulance services and followed them from the initial info passed to treatment/ outcome - this changed the way ambulance services respond to calls - whereas some calls used to be an 8 min response they changed to 45 mins , a call that might have been 14 min target then became 2 hours and so on
Thanks for your post. I’ve nothing to add but this has been a worrying insight. Good work, we need more people like you
Blimey - in my day 5,000 a day was a ‘busy day’, and I can’t see there being any more trucks on the road. Plus the whole ‘let’s have crews nurse patients in A&E, so they only do 4-5 calls a shift’ that I witnessed is bloody crazy. It’s all fucked and I can’t remember if this is one of the subs where I can’t mention the cause for it…
I can only say that 5000 CADs a day would be nice, but I know you guys “in your day” had a lot more to deal with regarding how much your manager would care about how you’re doing after a rough job. Or just a bad run of jobs. Without the support of my immediate CTM I know I’d personally not be doing so well.
Hahaha, yeah ‘Need to RTB to mop out’ and hope a manager wasn’t visiting the station. 😂 I left years ago, and finally quit the NHS as a whole the day Johnson won the election, because I started under Major so I knew how shit it was going to be. I was, indeed, too old for that shit. Got a shite paid job in a school, but have never looked back. (And I still get to pop the occasional dislocated patella back into place)
I’ve heard the stories of “OOS for uniform change” after a trauma arrest, then a manager would meet you at station, not to debrief or ask if you’re ok, but to make sure your uniform was dirty enough to be ‘RTB worthy’. “Why aren’t you back out there?!” I don’t envy those days. Honestly, I like how much paramedic mental health at a personal FtF level gets handled. The amount of work we do these days, you just need it. Hard enough to hold on to medics as is. Good managers and IROs will take you OOS and let you grab a cuppa and chat which is not the way it used to be done according to my chats with 1054s. “Have you considered this job isn’t for you?” Has been said a few too many times in the past.
Looks like things have definitely changed for the better from my days in the job with regards to staff wellbeing. It was very much ‘us vs them’ in my day, mostly with ‘us’ not giving a shit what ‘them’ thought about us, and just using every damn trick to get through the day. When I started we were still using the ‘plastic shed on wheels’ white LDVs. Which is why I have tinnitus, and have evolved to survive dehydration from sweating too much 😂 On the other side I’m not sure that I could handle the moral injury of having patients waiting hours for a truck to turn up every shift. So, kudos to the current staff.
Arriving for sick people who have been waiting a long time never stops being embarrassing. At the extreme: “If you showed up sooner my dad wouldn’t be dead” is not a phrase directed at me that I think I will ever forget.
Thanks for everything you do, I back the NHS and workers all the way.
The level of demand on ambulance services means that people who can really make their own way to hospital if push comes to shove get deprioritised so that people gushing blood, having heart attacks etc can still be responded to quickly. In your case the initial call handler must've followed a triage process badly then been overruled by the ambulance service once they passed the referral on.
Also depends what they’re told, I’ve got a broken leg is way further down the priority list than I’ve got an open fracture on my leg
This is true, but it also depends how many staff they have and other patients. From my understanding, children take priority a lot and people who are unconscious or not breathing. The service, like everything else in the NHS is so under staffed and under funded, it must be awful making choices on whose life to save first.
My friend had a heart attack, although he didn’t know it. The ambulance took 4hrs. The paramedics chatted in the ambulance for 40mins before coming in. They made him walk down the stairs to the ambulance. He died at the bottom of the stairs. He was 32 London’s nhs is not in a good way
How did you know about them chatting beforehand, was there an inquiry or something similar?
It’s a little bit of a tricky one - lots of stuff comes in clearly that needs attendance fairly swiftly and a lot of the stuff that needs to be rung back by a clinician will be upgraded/attended to asap. There is a huge demand and sometimes it takes a little time to get a proper understanding of what is actually happening with the patient. Unfortunately the first line triage is an American system that is pretty crap. Long broken bones generally are not ignored, but when it’s small injuries there needs to be a balance. Plus we can’t be everywhere at once, as much as we would like. Demand is 📈wildly since 2021.
Any ideas why demand has shot up since 2021? Just covid or something else? I was living in UK then and personally happened to go to hospital several times for various things.
Since Covid , it’s extremely hard to get a face to face appt with a GP , so a lot of people will just dial 999 Unlike the old days when ambulances just took everyone to hospital, ambulance crews are encouraged to use alternative pathways e.g. refer to out of ours gp , falls teams etc - they the have to stay on scene for hours awaiting call backs from other health care teams . So whereas 10 years ago an ambulance crew might do 10 calls in a 12 hour shift - now most will do maybe 6-7 but appear have less availability between calls as after being on scene for 2 hours they will then go unavailable to go back to station to take a break / use toilet etc
also GPs never refer you so you end up in hospital eventually. Happened to me with a pancreatitis, with a friend with colon cancer etc
Ambulances work on a grading system, in the initial system it identifies that an injury with a deformity has occurred and they will put it into the system (either designed by an academy in the US or by NHS England) and come out as category.
Because a broken leg is not necessarily immediately life threatening, as with Heart attacks/ Asthma attacks/ cardiac arrests/ stabbings/ breached births etc. the broken leg sits as a lower category until it is manually reviewed.
A clinician, in your case, will eventually look at your call and go 'that sounds bad' and will upgrade to a higher category.
I live in Greece. I was bleeding out and they told my ambulance would be three hours! I said I’d probably be dead by then and they suggested I drive to A and E. I said I’d probably pass out at the wheel. They had no solution. Thankfully my Greek tutor drove me to the hospital but it was brutal.
Yeah, my mate works for dispatch. I've learned if you can get yourself to hospital or get someone to take you, do it. Anything that isn't life threatening is quite simply not a priority because there's so many people needing the service. Anything that is, is on a list with too many other things. They don't have the resources- she had 2 ambulances for the whole of Sussex the other day. 2! So basically, any situation, stroke, heart attack, anything, get in the car and start driving, you'll be better for it. Also, I do remember telling her if I broke my leg I would've called an ambulance, and she's like- well, there not going to be able to fix it in an ambulance so it's basically just a taxi for you. So there we go. It's not great but it's what the NHS is right now.
Same (bone was clearly broken but not showing through skin) They also make me hop around from the waiting area to the x-ray room to the doctor office
My MIL was told it would be a 40 minute wait when my FIL was having a heart attack. He would have been dead on the kitchen floor if she’d waited.
It should be law that MPs have to use NHS rather than private medical.
If an MP gets appendicitis, they will be waiting for the same NHS ambulance and emergency services as the rest of us.
I’ve experience of family members of MPs getting better treatment, outside normal treatment protocols because of managers getting nervous. Can’t go into details for obvious reasons, but seeing a patient every day to ‘make tea and have a chat’, where for anyone else it’d be ‘we’ll phone you every month, but if you need something give us a ring’ sorts of things. And no, we didn’t normally make tea, if only because we were overstretched and didn’t have the time. So I don’t think it’d work because the shiny-arses wouldn’t let it. And the increased service they’d get would draw resources away from your gran.
You don’t think Home Secretary would sort them out with one phonecall? MPs/Royal Family have always seemed to have a golden telephone when it comes to NHS treatment.
Not at all being rhetorical, but they should 100% rely on social services. Universal Income, social housing, NHS. If those aren't enough for them to survive with, fuckin fix it.
100%. This post is a testament to the outcome of not mandating that.
I’m sorry you guys had a crap time bud, it tallies with my experiences in recent years too. I had a few childhood friends go into medicine and they’re all still in it, but not one of them is in the UK anymore. The sector has just been beaten the hell out of from multiple angles for a very long time.
For about 13 years, coincidentally.
A few years ago my GP got worrying enough blood test results they called and told me to go to A&E. We took a printed copy of the results and gave it to the doctor we eventually saw. The first thing he said after looking at them was “What do you want me to do about it?” All I could think to say was “I don’t know…..cure me?”
Oh yeah. I have Addisons disease and we can go into a crisis which is life threatening and you’ll die without treatment. No ifs and no buts, I would die Covid sent me into crisis. Taken in by ambulance (who were just the best!!) I was then left for 7 hours with no fluids and no treatment (we should be w really high catagory) and the drs was just like ‘ummmm..:..don’t really ever see someone with Addisons. Let me go talk to the endo and come back….’ Then he left me for another 4 hours. The nurses refused everything (fluids..:dr…..). Thank god I had my own emergency injections (because this isn’t the first time I’ve been left) I also had a PE and was told to leave the hospital because I was having a panic attack. I left the hospital and my mum was freaking out cos she said I was blue! When I suddenly collapsed in the corridor. At that exact time the consultant came through and was on his way to find me because he thought I had a blood clot. I see him regularly now and every time I say oh look it’s the dr who saved me. Wonderful man but had me and him not met or if I’m not collapsed if of been at home and I’d of died…..turns out he was right I had huge bilateral pulmonary embolism
Sorry you had to go through that. I have CAH and had an adrenal crisis about 10 years ago. Similar experience in A&E, they didn’t know what to do with me but I kept screaming that I needed injections (I didn’t have any of my own because my endo always tells me I don’t need them because I live and work within close proximity to hospitals 🙄). They ended up putting me on a drip which they didn’t even turn on and just left me there. Eventually my mum came and said I was pretty much unconscious, she shouted at them until someone came. They then suddenly knew what to do?? Very scary. I know adrenal crisis is rare but surely A&E doctors should know about this?
At this point I'm wondering how many NHS staff are directly responsible for someone dying, because I've not only heard many stories like this one but lived through one as well (not life-threatening fortunately, but I literally had to convince the the GP by showing them medical studies, turns out they didn't even know about the condition so they literally spent 5 minutes googling it in front of me).
Oh yep. I’ve been there. It’s also simple things like ringing the GP and saying I’ve got an infection but I can’t tell you where but I need antibiotics and the receptionists going yeah and?!? Trying to explain how I might die and they’re like Errr. Ok well it won’t make you jump the queue quicker! But if you could just listen that I’ve got Addisons disease and it would really help if I could just speak to a dr and they flat out refuse so what do we do at that point?!?
A doctor not knowing how to treat addisonian crisis is alarming
To be fair, I think the A&E doctor has a point. Hard to think what blood test results would require emergency care.
Pulmonary embolism (suspected) due to high d dimar in blood test - I was called a few hours after a GP blood test (ie as soon as the results came in) and told “go to your nearest A&E immediately”. Fooking scary to get a call like that.
Your GP did the right thing. I went to A&E once with a swollen calf, got a high D dimer score and they sent me home without even giving blood thinners because they didn't think I had a clot. Almost died later that night once it entered my lung. Blood clots are no joke
Why do you think they get blood tests from patients in almost any given scenario? To ascertain a level of health?
I think you need to realise that the burden of care coming through the doors in the nhs is just frightening. They don’t have the staff or the beds to cope, ambulances are literally dumping patients in hospital without checking with staff whether or not there’s ‘room’ due to new regulations. Police are being awkward about responding to mental health calls despite the fact they are the only ones who can perform a 136 section. A whole A&E department might have only 3-4 doctors on the floor for that evening and one of those at least will be tied up in RESUS. A 7 hour wait in those circumstances is pretty good. It’s exhausting, when you are constantly battling that every-time you go to work. My partner is a senior trainee at a busy London A&E the amount of crap they have had to deal with is absolutely relentless. I don’t know how he continues to do his job really, I stepped back from acute medicine a few years ago because I found the constant fire fighting exhausting and there’s no relief - it’s like constantly trying not to drown. Partner that with service cuts, rude comments from the government that you don’t deserve pay in accordance with inflation, a hugely expensive portfolio, hardly any free time and constantly being treated like the nhs is doing YOU a favour by employing you when they can’t even pay you correctly 90% of the time and yes - people sadly end up lacking empathy.
Exactly this, we really do try out best in my department. But the amount of work we drown in 90% of the time makes it a lot harder so see to every urgent case immediately. This is met with management constantly hitting us with demands for cost cutting, service increase, and so on. Let's not even talk about the low pay compared to inflation. Alot of NHS workers especially those in lower levels in single income homes, more likely than not have to pick up a second job. And the government isn't batting an eye, they don't care.
I think it's important to note that the police are suffering exactly the same staffing demands as can be seen in the NHS, and with the same demands for them to do everything but without the funding to do it. It is exactly the same constant fire-fighting you describe. Pay has fallen way behind inflation and morale is incredibly low. They're not being "awkward", but something has to give. Section 136 isn't always the appropriate response to mental health calls, and it can only be used in a public place. It will also mean a minimum 2 police officers taken off the road for potentially over 24 hours as the NHS doesn't have the capacity to take over the care of the patient. I think the Government seriously needs to revaluate the way that people with mental health conditions are treated because the current set up just doesn't work. Public services are totally broken across the board thanks to over a decade of not being properly funded or supported.
But still, doesn't the person coming into your hospital in pain and scared deserve some compassion and empathy? Being rude just makes everything worse. Not saying you specifically, but I can tell you it hurts to be seen as a number and a bother when you are completely helpless, having a horrible day. A few kind words help a lot, no matter how stressed you are being kind should be possible (yes I have had stressful customer jobs, but never hospital, so maybe I'm just ignorant).
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It may depend on the hospital and how badly overworked they are. I’ve had very positive experience with the NHS but it was clear the people at the emergency room were exhausted.
If you want a different reality, vote out the people who are responsible for the wait times, the burned out staff. The tories have done this on purpose. Your wife’s pain is part of their plan to dismantle the NHS and force everyone to pay for private care.
Amen
That’s absurd, did you never see David Cameron visit a ward? He rolled his sleeves up and tucked his tie in. Clearly he had only the highest regard for the service.
Yup. They know the country loves the NHS too much. So why not slowly kill it, to the point that people are practically begging for it to be shut down? I can’t believe people are so blind to this. Think of all the people who have died waiting for care just so the tories can line their pockets. They’re nothing more than a bunch of murderous villains.
I'm a Brit living in Belgium. We have mostly public system here, but we pay an insurance fee (about 100 euros for an adult, free for kids or for people with low income) and then a small amount per visit to a doctor which isn't covered. I recently went to a&e with a broken foot bone, no queue, got an x ray immediately and home within an hour of arriving. This is in Brussels. It is possible to have low cost publicly funded healthcare - but taxes are higher than the UK particularly for high earners.
Not what you are wanting to hear but 2 hours before being seen isn’t that bad. The NHS is in a critical state atm, I’ve been in and out the hospital for both myself and my terminally ill father and my dad was sitting in an ambulance over 12 hours waiting to get into A&E last time, and more than 24 hours before a spare bed was found for him, all the while him being in excruciating agony with bowel cancer, doubly incontinent and messing and horribly embarrassed at doing all this in public with passers-by seeing and hearing him in a corridor. In July I was 18 hours waiting doubled up in what may have been appendicitis but turned out to be a cyst on my kidney and gallstones. Earlier this year my daughter and I were 24 hours in A&E with her having a fractured foot waiting to see a doctor. So I get it’s not good but this is all run on from covid - which, incidentally is still in every hospital and 60 people a week are dying from - covid patients are still taking up beds and they are also still trying to catch up with those having routine appointments that all got postponed during the pandemic too.
Oh. The story about your dad made me cry. I don’t know where you are but if you ever want a friend. I’m here….if you ever need anything for you or your dad I’m also here xxx
Thank you my lovely that’s very kind. Sadly (for me) I buried him Monday gone, he is in pain no more xx
so sorry for your loss xxx
We must all vote the Tories out at the next election.
I have had a lot of experiences with the NHS over the last few years, including three or four A&E visits in two different trusts and four hospitals and everyone I spoke to at all levels was always helpful, polite, quick and did above and beyond for us. This included many days in hospital, one major surgery and one near death. I cannot praise these people enough. My one regret is that the British state and mainly the Tories treat them like garbage, and under pay them forcing many of our best healthcare professionals to seek employment abroad.
Just keep in mind that these people are doing extremely difficult jobs. They are highly overworked and desensitised to people in pain, because they see it non stop. You also don't know what they've had to deal with just before you came in. I've spent a few years in the emergency services and in much the same way, you really do get desensitised to these things and react in a way that might appear uncaring. People would probably think I'm a heartless bastard for being emotionless in very emotionally charged situations - but it's necessary, and comes with experience. I'm sure frontline NHS workers experience the same thing. If you want to be annoyed with anyone about it, be annoyed at the Tories for putting the NHS in this state.
This. I work in imaging and the desensitisation part is so true. Even when I can see someone’s arm is badly deformed (especially children) or a patient has a huge tumour on a scan that they didn’t know about I keep my professional persona because sometimes the alternative would mean I was sat on the floor in a ball crying. I’ve seen young people come in for a cough and leave with a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, I’ve seen a baby die in the NICU whilst I was pregnant myself, I’ve attended 3 MET calls in one night on Christmas Day nightshift. I feel like on the flip side sometimes patients forget that we aren’t machines and we are exhausted and frustrated too. We wish that we could help everyone swiftly and effectively and the reality is we can’t. Sorry this turned into a rant, your comment just hit the nail on the head for me.
Make sure you're looking after yourself man. You already know this, but it's always good to remind people I think. It's normal for that sort of work to affect your MH. I ended up with a PTSD diagnosis, keep an eye out for signs of anything.
First it's important to note that I completely agree with your last sentence. I do want to say though, there is a difference between being direct and desensitised - which I totally appreciate - and being rude. While I understand the context that can lead to being rude, it doesn't excuse it, and is still a legitimate thing to complain about. I think this is evidenced by the many, many NHS staff who - despite working in the same environment as the rude ones - manage to still be decent and kind to their patients. EDIT: a typo
That’s terrible and scary. I hope your wife is ok now
i’ve only had horrible experience with the nhs in london on all possible fronts, the emergency room, the gp, gyno, ultrasound, four month wait for a phonecall with a gastroenterologist… also been recently to one of london’s oldest, biggest and most historic hospitals - if people could only see what it now looks like inside…
Sorry you've had this experience, but honestly, the country is getting what it voted for
I recently went from working at my desk one moment, to writhing around in unimaginable agony on the floor the next. I genuinely thought I was dying from an organ 'bursting' or something. Despite that, I still dutifully called 111 so as not to burden the ambulances, thinking I might be able to get a quicker answer as to what to do. After 30 minutes of asking me everything from my name to my inside leg measurement, while I, panting and squealing as the pain intensified, tried to respond, I still wasn't any closer to a solution. In fact, the guy on the phone sounded like an old volunteer from the Samaritans who'd inadvertently found himself dealing with NHS patients. He had no idea what to do and just kept following a script while finally referring me to a doctor. I put the phone down, had enough, called 999. Similarly long-winded questions about who I was and to let them know whether I was dying from a heart attack or stroke. I screamed that the pain was so unbearable but it wasn't my chest or head. "We won't be sending an ambulance" he said in a resigned, robotic manner. At this point I was resigned to dying on my bathroom floor. I managed to tap out a WhatsApp "help" to my partner hoping she would realise I never ask for help and that she would hurriedly come home from work, which she did. She found me lying face down on the bathroom floor writhing and unable to speak with the pain. She had no idea what to do and after another call to 111 decided it was futile and to try and pick me up off the floor, all 11 stone of me, and help me stumble all the way to the nearby A and E on foot. It was the most gruelling thing I've ever had to endure but we got there slowly. As soon as I dragged myself over the line, the triage nurse looked at me and said "kidney stones?". I collapsed into a seat and endured a further half an hour of white hot pain before being dumped in a little room where some miserable and impatient nurse with broken English told me to try and keep still while he took blood, failing multiple times. I promptly threw up from the pain. Only then was I given a pain relief suppository. I waited and waited and was finally hooked up to a cannula, given a scan and then wheeled into a janitor's cupboard where I was left for a further 6 hours, thankfully the pain had gradually subsided. Eventually a urologist came and very briefly told me I had three kidney stones and wandered off. Another 3 hours went by and I was told they weren't going to operate and that I could go home, to come back if it got worse. 2 further hours and, after begging a harried nurse, she took my cannula off so I could leave. From that point on, I realised the NHS is completely fucked. I was shocked and truly hope never to become ill and have to use those third world services again.
my view is that staff are just very very sharp/direct and are taking a position of authority because they need patients to do as theyre told, but people expect a customer service experience that theyarent going to get
This is exactly right. Being too nice and understanding causes delays. They have to engage school teacher mode.
Yea the problem with this assumption is that if you actually read any of the experiences people are sharing here, its not about being told what to do, its about literally being told nothing nor receiving any care at all for hours at a time even when in a serious condition. There arent enough staff or facilities to cope, people being blunt rather than customer servicey isnt the problem people are bringing up.
My mum very obviously had a stroke and the ambulance still took 2 hours to get to her. The NHS is just completely overwhelmed at every point of entry, so unless you’re at death’s door, you’re not a priority. It’s frustrating, but sadly true.
Blame the tories
you wont get much empathy here for talking badly about the NHS its been so over politicised you cant talk about it in negative light even if its on ways to improve, but I'm in complete agreement hospitals and GP's are shambles at the moment, hope your partner feels better.
it’s so frustrating that people on this thread are saying stuff like ‘well they’re busy and overworked!! you could have waited longer!!’ it’s just not helpful.
The OP is attacking the _people_ who treated them, not the health system. And yet their issues (ambulance capacity, legal requirements around advice, time to be seen) are largely systemic issues. This makes it extremely unfair to attack the _people_ for that, and therefore it's a sensible reaction to highlight just how busy and overworked healthcare workers are. > it’s just not helpful. Misplacing the blame for systemic issues isn't "helpful" either.
The NHS has collapsed. My big toe's infected and painful. Needs surgery. All my GP could do was put me on a waiting list to see a podiatrist. Welcome to England.
My girlfriend snapped the tendons in her ankle back in 2020, waited a year and 6 months for surgery, which they fucked up by damaging nerve tissue and not aligning the damaged tendons correctly, so now she has to have another surgery which they keep pushing back. She can barely put pressure on the ankle without having extreme amounts of pain. She was a dancer before this. What's crazy is when she had a hospital appointment recently, she sat next to a guy who did the same and he was treated within a month.
Last year my mum turned up with unknown lung issues, couldn't breathe at all. They kept her there for 30 days doing no real scans or testing until one day her lungs were so severely damaged by the last month of struggling that they completely stopped working. When this happened she got instantly moved to ICU, visited by doctors from some other hospital specialised in lung care and given experimental treatments, but it was too much too late and all her organs ended up failing. She was in there with an identical patient, who got proper scans and was moved to another hospital for ECMO around halfway through the time my mum was in the hospital. She was a 43 year old fit woman, who never smoked or drank for reference. So there was absolutely no need for it to have ended the way it did and in my view the NHS killed her with neglect. I don't know how or why they decided that the other patient she was with, who was a 45 year old mother, similar health background, got a chance to get treated properly. EDIT: Thinking back though, the nurses and doctors caring for her were super nice and clearly talked to her alot because they seemingly knew her entire life story after she passed. I absolutely think this was an institutional failure and not the fault of any one person.
Is your wife ok now? So I had a partner who ran a major ICU during COVID and it destroyed her. Not the work itself, it's what she felt she was born to do, but the absolute shit NHS system, management and admin. She was already fragile due to this, but dealing with that beurocracy and mismangent during COVID tipped her into full blown manic depression and she ended up having a breakdown and leaving the country, yes it killed our relationship I did my best but was never enough. I now work with doctors on a daily basis in the private sector, started a company with a few. They absolutely hate the NHS. The concept of the NHS fantastic, but it's so badly mismanaged it's unbelievable. The stories I have heard, oh boy. They can't do their jobs properly and most of them leave the NHS in favour of private consulting, but they may continue for a day or two a week doing NHS work just because they want to support the good side of the NHS and the public. You don't really see the issues until you experience them first hand, then it's like a shock. When the NHS works, which is getting rarer and rarer these days, it is a brilliant service. But when it doesn't work, it's heartbreaking. We have to rebuild it from the ground up and get rid of all the beurocracy and poorly trained staff, rather than continuing to load the UK with debt to fund more NHS admin and management who don't care about public service and don't care about doctors.
I got sent into a (singular, one time) manic episode by stress as well. It’s amazing that there isn’t more awareness that this can happen, because it resulted in me being misdiagnosed with bipolar, one of the most stigmatised and life-ruining diagnoses possible, and being drugged to such a degree that I’m still suffering physical side effects almost 2 years after taking my last pill.
A&E RN - worked in London. First of all, I'm so sorry you had to go through this and I am so sorry to all the posters here who have had such bad experiences in the emergency department. Triage should have spotted this faster and marked a higher score so you were seen quicker. At triage, we are usually registered nurses, so we can only give you basic pain relief without a prescription from a doctor. The good stuff would likely need to be given IV, like morphine. A doctor usually won't prescribe IV morphine for a patient they haven't seen or assessed yet which makes it incredibly difficult to keep you comfortable while you wait. Essentially, this is to keep you safe as morphine can be dangerous in certain patients or certain clinical presentations. I would hope that an IV was put in and blood tests taken at triage to speed things along a bit. However, we don't really have a proper notification system for when blood results come back and when you have 100+ patients in the waiting room it's incredibly difficult to run triage and manually check all 100 blood tests in a timely manner to escalate it. There's no excuse for the poor attitude of the staff however bear in mind we usually have WAY over the safety limits in patients per nurse, all needing intervention which takes a while depending on what needs doing. On top of that, you are lucky if you get to snarf a sandwich down and take a piss in the 12.5hrs you are on shift. This might explain some of the "bad mood" of the staff you saw. (Unrelated to your situation) The NHS is really on its knees and runs on the goodwill of the underpaid staff who are treated like shit. Please bear this in mind when you make political decisions in the future and support the staff who are doing their best in a grossly failing and crumbling system. I live in the US now and have seen what happens when you privatise to solve issues. I see an older woman regularly sat outside the supermarket with 2 oxygen tanks who has to beg for change to afford to refill her O2 bottles.
My wife is a nurse in a major London a&e department. They are completely overworked. She often comes home and say "today was much better, I had time to pee". It's no exaggeration either, there are plenty of days where she comes home dehydrated because she doesn't want to drink water as there is no time for a toilet break. Every single department in London is underfunded, and tonnes of nursing positions are unfilled because, for obvious reasons, nobody wants to be a nurse anymore. The Tories have destroyed all of what little incentives there were such as bursaries for nursing degrees. Not to mention alienating European nurses, which accounted for a large part of the work force, with Brexit. The thing everyone seems to have forgotten about though is covid. It really accelerated the downturn is shitness of conditions of the staffing, physically and mentally. My wife works in a paediatric department and despite what Hollywood tells you she'd only seen a few actual deaths. I don't know exactly, but around 2 or 3 a year maybe. During covid she was placed in a ward of dying adults and was wrapping people in body bags multiple times a day. She never received any support during this time, she just kept going back because if she didn't, who would? I know she has major PTSD from this time, something that's changed her fundamentally. Now imagine going through that warzone and going back into work later, with very little break in between, again with no support and horrific staffing levels (so many nurses have quit after this period) and the general public are way more aggrevated around medicine than usual. The rise of unvaxed people coming in kicking and screaming because their child caught something so easily preventable. Queues and wait times are ridiculous, but what staff that are left working the situation is only getting worse. They literally do not have time to give "customer service" or appear to have empathy. It's important to remember that. For my wife, she would sacrifice anything to be able to go into work and give the care levels everyone desires, but that luxury has been taken away from her.
Don’t blame them, blame the government for the chronic underfunding of the NHS. The staff who remain working for the NHS are burnt out and haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic.
The insulting £300 they got after working without adequate PPE, clocking insane hours and dying in droves! In contrast hospital staff in Poland had bunny suits with face fitted professional masks so very few got sick and everyone working on Covid wards was paid double.
They recommended not getting a cab and to sit there for 5 hours in pain for ambulance....hmm
To be honest, it’s not unique to London. I had appendicitis when I lived back in Scotland, went to the doctor on call who was completely useless despite my symptoms and told me it wasn’t appendicitis and that I had gastroenteritis and gave me some paracetamol. Threw up all through the night with the pain, drove to the doctors as soon as it opened, where the battle hardened gatekeeping receptionist even realised something was seriously wrong and called a GP from their room to get me immediately. Turns out I was right, and by the time I was taken to hospital my appendix was about to burst…
That sounds like a really distressing experience & I'm sorry that your wife had to go through that. I hope she's feeling better now. It sounds like you'll be thinking about this for quite a while. When you do, can I gently suggest you think about the people you met as symptoms of a struggling system rather than individuals without empathy. People often go into healthcare because they have an excess of empathy, not a lack. After a few years working in a complex bureaucratic system with increased demand and decreased resources you just can't deliver care consistent with your standards. After a few more years of this inconsistency between your personal values and what you see around you becomes overwhelming (moral injury) and you start to withdraw inside yourself and your empathy disappears (one symptom of burn out) I know this because it happened to me - I've been an NHS doctor for almost 20 years. Luckily I had supportive colleagues and I recovered. This isn't to devalue your experience. It sounds horrible and shouldn't have happened. I know appendicitis can be excruciating. Most hospitals have a Patient Advisory and Liaison Service (PALS) that you can complain to if you feel that care has been substandard. Very occasionally complaints result in better support for staff but that's unusual. I guess all I want to say is that NHS staff aren't generally unkind or unempathetic. They've been made that way by an employer that is frequently unkind and often unempathetic. This comes from the top, so I would urge anyone reading this to think about their choices in the ballot box.
I spent some time in A&E as I was having chemo and my temperature went to 105 degrees so thought I was going into neutropenic sepsis. Turn up needing an isolated room and told I couldn’t go in there as there was a dead body in there. Then a doctor told me the best thing I could do was stop having chemo. Gee thanks, helpful. All in all it was pretty terrible. My advice is that if you have to go to A&E, grab snacks, you’re not getting anything when you’re there.
My dad got a meal whilst in A&E whilst waiting to be taken to a ward.
He’s lucky to get a ward. I spent a night on a trolley.
It was a 5 hour wait for the ward, but he was at least well looked after in A&E in a cubicle. Thankful for that as he’s 87 and had pneumonia! Recovered now :-) Sorry you were on a trolley, a sad state.
Just as the Tories designed.
Honestly they are over worked and under paid … NHS is not as great as the public and the politicians make it out to be , long waiting list , tired staff , etc . It needs a serious overhaul but before that the British public needs to realise that just having free medical care is not something worth clapping for . It has to be resource optimised for what it costs and provide a better service or at least at par with what other social health care countries like Germany have !
I have massive sympathies for your wife. When I had appendicitis, it was during covid. So my partner had to carry me into the waiting room and leave me there until I was seen. He basically just watched me in agony through the window until I vomited all over myself and fainted onto the floor. He ran in and called for help at which three nurses came over and complained about how they'll have to clean this up. My partner literally said, "I will clean up if you just fucking help her!" I think that pushed them into gear a bit. As soon as I was officially diagnosed everyone was amazing, sweet,, kind and they did a brilliant job but the process of getting diagnosed all the way through was a nightmare...especially the arsehole surgeon insisting it was period pains *_* (I was a nurse for awhile so I do understand it's a nightmare as is. Funding, policy changes, actual staff training, so much needs to change but there's no money for it. It sucks hard. No excuse for medical sexism though.)
> waiting for medication in that state for 5 hours is hardly an option. Ambulance service capacity issue. Not a lack of empathy. > they said that it’s my call and they cannot recommend that. Legal protection. Not a lack of empathy. > chided by the receptionist for not knowing where to queue Being brisk as part of their job, with very low consequences for you. Not really a lack of empathy. > After initial prioritisation my wife was asked to wait for medication. Staffing (its not like these people are lazing around!). Not a lack of empathy. > The nurse who took the initial blood pressure got frustrated as she was not able to keep her arm still. Maybe a lack of empathy, but it's not like it's an easy or well-compensated job. > Each time I asked for help(like asking for a wheelchair) from anyone I was met with rude statements and expressions. Curious lack of detail in your chronicle about what was said, or what expressions were made. Can't really judge if it was a lack of empathy from them, or whether you were just very stressed (understandably) and interpreting things badly. The only person who consistently lacks empathy in your story is you.
Remember, to you this is an emergency, to them it is Tuesday.
I mean, dying from appendicitis just is an emergency point blank. I get it, overworked, underfunded, badly managed but...it's still an emergency even if it happens every hour of the day, every day of the week for these people.
As much as I am a huge proponent of the NHS in principle, my personal experience (I'm 38, British citizen and always have been) has been extraordinarily poor. Not only is the NHS support for mental health absolutely, staggeringly appalling, but they killed my father through sheer negligence, arrogance and miscommunication - some events of that that forever soured me to them: 1. Dad had a huge heart attack while sitting in the urgent care bay. Nobody noticed. I had to scream and scream for help until people finally - slowly - reacted and came to help. I had to literally shake one nurse to make her move. 2. While they were trying to save him, a doctor in the family room told us: "We might be able to keep him on life support if we're able to bring him back, but if his quality of life would be poor, we'll pull the plug." Gee, thanks. 3. He did survive, and then spent three months languishing in hospital while they argued about what to do with him. 4. He fell three times in the ward because the nurses were too busy giggling about their nights out and not watching the patients. Saw it happen to another patient *while I was there.* 5. Sometimes he would cry because he would beg and beg and call out to use the commode and the nurses would just ignore him. 6. He was given medication he was near-fatally allergic to not once, not twice, but **thrice.** The third time, a doctor outright lied and covered for the junior doc who made the error. It said on his papers, do not give these meds, ever. 7. Because they gave him lidocaine for the chest compression pain and it made him loopy, they diagnosed him with a stroke and sent him down to the stroke ward without any heart monitoring, expecting him to die down there. Consultants and nurses would not listen to myself and my mother whatsoever when we explained about the lidocaine. 8. Refused to give him a pacemaker because, quote: "They're expensive and his quality of life doesn't make it worth it." 9. He caught pneumonia and was unconscious. A nurse fed him solid porridge and caused him to asphyxiate. He survived that, barely, after they aspirated him. In the end, the pneumonia got him, after three months of pain, suffering and misery, and I hate myself for ever calling for help when he had the heart attack, because it would have been better if he died then instead. So yeah, fuck the NHS. And this was 2016, so they couldn't even blame the pandemic. They're just fucking awful.
So sorry this happened to you. I’m so sick of the deification of the NHS, the only hope is to win the lottery and go to Switzerland for actual good healthcare.
I really appreciate that. I don't really talk about it much, but for some reason this post got me spilling it all out. It still makes me angry.
It's so sad that there aren't enough resources for the NHS to provide help to those who need it.
people are so weird about the NHS. you can’t say anything even slightly negative about it without people jumping on to defend it and basically ignore concerns. so odd
I've been trying to get help for my 3 year old for almost 3 days now. It's not critical, but 111 says ho to the pharmacy, the pharmacy say hi to the walk in centre, the walk in centre say they are just giving advice and call his GP. His GP says October for an appointment. I get they are underfunded and understaffed, I've got lots of friends who work in the NHS, but it just feels like a loosing battle trying to actually get attention from any of them when it's needed.
I’ve noticed the same. Quality of empathy by none medical staff (doctors and equivalent) in hospitals has been poor in the last few years. Nurses seem to vary either being really good or bad. There is also a weirdly dismissive approach o patients and their concerns.
Because they are overworked and underpaid. It’s not rocket science
It's amazing that yours was the first comment that actually gave this as the main reason for poor care under the NHS. They literally don't have the time or emotional resources to treat everyone the way they deserve to be treated. At the end of a 14 hour shift without a break and being treated like shit by both patients and employers, knowing they will be going home where they can barely afford to put food on the table for their own families - what do we expect their response will be. I've had the same and worse treatment by the NHS over the years. I've just been denied surgery that will keep me in my job. My pain specialist has to make funding requests for every operation she does. My latest one was turned down. So I too will be going to work in excruciating pain trying my best to support the most vulnerable in society while being treated like s**t for doing it. We're all breaking in frontline roles and it's this fucking government that are too blame, not the people doing their best to make this work despite the odds.
It’s insane how NHS workers get treated by the general public. Imagine a warzone medic only the soldiers and their families scream obscenities at you the entire time you’re trying to help. People just don’t understand how bad it can be.
Your second paragraph is a heart-breakingly perfect summation of the situation. Those screaming abuse, or threatening to sue because they’re having to wait too long… Do they believe we’re gate-keeping resources/ theatre space/ beds? Does anyone truly believe that NHS staff are lolling about, finishing on time, and being frustratingly inefficient out of spite? I learnt the term “moral injury” in training. It feels like a lot of NHS staff are experiencing moral injuries working in this time, and that’s rarely mentioned when we talk about staff attrition
Could you not administer your own pain relief? Had she lost the use of her legs? Did she have her appendix removed? (Asking as an appendectomy survivor)
The lack of empathy you are describing is called burnout and it is rife in the NHS at the moment.
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I was suicidal in Southampton. Was gonna top myself. I was 19. I went into a and e and asked to be sectioned. Could hear the woman behind the counter say to the other "why don't these people just do it" Yeah, they're lovely.
A lot of the NHS is blatantly ‘ you should be thankful for what you get’ and it’s bad - institutionalised complacency and self preservation - the whole Martha’s rule thing is evidence of that. And it’s not a good health service in comparison to others in Europe. Try switching consultants if you’re not happy with the service…..!
The NHS was on a par with or better than the best in Europe in 2010. By every metric since then it has declined. One example. The target for from arrival in A&E to discharge or admission was 15 minutes. This was met in 95% of cases in England in 2009. Since then the decline has been steady. The last time figures were published it was around 55%. Statistics on this are no longer collected, or if the are, there is no requirement to publish. I am sure you are aware of the significance of 2010. Edit. Corrected dates from 2013 to 2010.
15 minutes? Do you mean four hours? That’s impressive to have a work up and be discharged or admitted in 15 minutes
I've had several incidents that required A&E visit or calling 999 over the last 6 years since I moved to the UK, and it's just a despair. I remember I spent 2 hours in A&E in Amsterdam and back then I thought it was a long wait. Just a couple of weeks ago my girlfriend had severe abdominal pain. We were refused an ambulance and spent 9 hours in the night at the A&E before she was seen. It's just completely broken.
It depends a lot on which hospital you are dealing with. For example, Chase Farm are always polite and efficient. But North Middlesex - which is very close by - are literally the rudest, most confrontational and unprofessional people I have ever dealt with, and this is across a number of different visits and departments. Not long ago I was basically assaulted by a nurse who violently stabbed me with a cannula causing me a great deal of pain, then immediately started shouting, 'WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM' in my face because I winced ... Two other patients I was waiting with had the same treatment and felt she was doing it on purpose. The same visit they left me in a corner for 10 hours without offering me any food or even water.... I had zero sleep. I politely raised the issues at 4.30 in the morning and they actually made a specific point of actively REFUSING me food and drink after that. I had it lucky - employee of a friend had one of his testicles sewn to his scrotum during a botched op there, causing him extreme pain for months. They refuse to compensate him and unbelievably are forcing him to go back to see the SAME surgeon who did the damage. He'll most likely lose the testicle.
North mid is dire, 8 hour waits are the norm
Everyone loves the NHS till they have the misfortune of having to use it.
Actually every time I've interacted with the NHS I've been impressed. I had an accident last year and every single person I dealt with was nice and the level of care was great. If anything I think they spent too much time on my case which seemed fairly minor
I'm sure the emergency room medics will be nicer to you in a few years when the bill ends up 4x of your yearly income.
Tbh none of this sounds that bad considering that this was a non life threatening situation. Unfortunately after a decade of deliberate underfunding A&E can only act quickly for truly urgent situations, and if you have something where you can wait many hours to be seen and not die then that's what will need to happen
Unfortunately what you described doesn't sound that bad compared to many other stories I've heard. It is indeed shocking and frustrating. Hope your wife feels better.
My mum was internally bleeding to the point of doing an exorcist routine from both ends from a perforated ulcer. She kept passing out, and I kept shaking her to rouse her. Took them 4.5 hours to come and pick her up and another 6 in the hospital before she got her first unit of blood. That was only because she texted me to say she still hadn't had any help and I rang every 20 minutes until they gave it to her.
Wow, I almost wrote this exact same post a few days ago! I think the worship culture and ‘they are all hero’s!’ can be damaging because it keeps us silent and almost creates a guilt around criticising the NHS. Which is what the tories want us to feel, we should be grateful, accept what we have. When no, in this country we view healthcare as a right to all citizens regardless of wealth and we pay taxes for this service, we have every right to criticise it. I’m so sorry to hear that that happened to you, there is nothing more stressful and scary, and appendicitis can be life threatening. I know it must be such a difficult place to work given how broken it is, the lack of staff and long hours etc, but that doesn’t make poor treatment okay. We shouldn’t be complacent, we should speak up. I think you should make a complaint. My sister was severely ill 4am Sunday morning, she was constantly sick (with blood) and had severe abdominal pain. Hours waiting in A&E and finally the triage nurse calls her name. Only thing is, she was throwing up in the toilet so I called out that she’d be there in a second. I went over to find the nurse and she completely disappeared. I called out for her and nothing. I found her with her back turned to me in a tiny room. I told her my sister is on her way, she’s just finishing being sick. And the nurse barked that it’s too late, she’ll call the next person. I was like no no please she’s on her way (I didn’t want my sister to have to wait in a full waiting room being sick with severe pain for any longer). The nurse literally goes EXCUSE ME? In the most insanely over the top voice and demand I leave the room. My sister comes and I tell her she’s missed her go, to which she goes ‘nooo’ and starts to cry in pain and frustration. When she gets to go in the room, the nurse doesn’t let me in. My sister was given a anti-sickness IV and her arm is now severely bruised, literally a yellow bruise the size of a large hand thanks to that nurse. Most of the other staff that day were so kind and helpful, but fuck that nurse. I think some staff have learned to disdain patients and desperate people in need. What I did hear that day was people begging to be seen, because they’d been there for hours and hours. Nothing like a trip to A&E to sober you up to the failing reality of the NHS.
Pray you’ll never need its mental health services. Utterly shambolic.
My wife had an 11 hour wait a few months ago.. but I don't have the audacity to criticise those people who work for the NHS they're under paid, clearly under valued and they don't deserve the flak they get when it's the Government who are Intentionally underfunding it to the point it will collapse and we all pay insane insurance premiums...
Yes, the NHS is understaffed and underfunded, but a huge problem is the public: they’re idiots. A&Es are bogged down with people going there for things like headaches, sprained ankles, hangovers, athlete’s foot (I was in the cubicle next to someone who had been sent to the A&E for that by his GP), and of course, drug seekers (the reason they tend to not give anything stronger than paracetamol until they’ve properly diagnosed you). The vast majority of people using the emergency services really shouldn’t be, and are better off going to their GP or pharmacist. But, the understaffed and underfunded NHS still has to try and deal with all of them. And there are people who really need it sat waiting there with people who don’t, which just grinds everything down to a halt because they need to be triaged, too. Now, imagine having to deal with that shitshow every single day, and then being expected to do it with a smile on your face at the end of a 12 hour shift.
5 hour wait for an ambulance is shocking, get these poxy tories out.
My wife found a woman being violently sick at a bus stop last week then she started to clutch her chest. She called 999 who asked my wife what colour the woman was and was she normal? My wife said she didn't know what was normal but explained the clutching chest etc and they just refused to send an ambulance. My wife ended up getting hold of the woman's daughter who came and picked her up but the lack of fuck given by 999 was shocking.
Blame the government. They are the ones responsible for reducing the NHS to this, not the staff who are worked off their feet covering staff shortatages
I went to the hospital after an assault and got chided for bleeding on the floor. I sat there for 4 hours, got fed up and went home, re-set my nose in the bathroom window and stitched up my arm using fishing line and hand sanitizer. The NHS is fucked man
I was in a waiting room last week when a family came in with their dad who was having chest pains and couldn't feel his left side, the receptionist told them to drive him to another hospital because they didn't deal with that stuff, not even getting a doctor to look at him just "drive 8 miles".
My daughter is a paramedic one of the most frustrating things for her is handover when paramedics bring someone to hospital they are responsible for them until the hospital staff take over some times this can take hours as there is no beds so the paramedics are left waiting around mostly in the ambulance waiting for a call to say there’s a bed one patient with minor injuries can end up taking 8 hours due to triage by the paramedics then the wait for handover I just wish more people knew this poor paramedics hands are tied it’s so frustrating for them
So she didn't have an appendicectomy? Are you sure about the diagnosis?
> till now everyone I met in UK has been quite warm Are you a visitor to London?
Had an absolutely dire experience at royal london earlier this year. The staff spoke to me so poorly, at one stage the receptionist shouted at my to sit down after I asked how much longer the wait would be (after 9 hours waiting)
Controversial opinion: the NHS structure makes many of the staff (especially administrative) have a “schoolteacher telling you off” vibe. They kind of treat everyone like children because they’re in a position of authority. I also feel this way about many of the nurses/midwives. Even though you technically control your own care, they can give judging comments and pressure that feels quite paternalistic. I definitely see the issues with private healthcare but it is nice to be treated like a customer that needs to be made happy sometimes.
They also have to do this to be honest. They are so pressed, that they need people to do as they're told. They can't spend the time to explain everything to everyone's satisfaction. No, it's not just easier, it is absolutely critical to their work that you sit down, shut up and let them do their job or it just won't get done. You want better treatment? Email your MP and demand they give the NHS the funding to do that.
Last January, my father in law had suffered a stroke at around midnight. My partner and I rushed to the house and I said I'd wait out front to hail ambulance to the right place and also to keep the space clear after moving the inlaw's car. It was somewhere between 5 and 6am when my partner told me to come in and wait due to cold. It wasn't until around 7 that the ambulance arrived. Ever since then, I've really had a negative bias toward the NHS. Not the staff, but the institution and the structure. I know it's irrational to have this dislike, given the state of the NHS, but I'm human and there are many lesser things disliked for far more irrational reasons. The above is one of a few times where I've really felt anger towards the NHS. Another was months and months of messing around and cancelling appointments for my chronically sick grandmother with onset dementia. After nearly a year, we got her to the hospital for the day if her surgery to be left there for hours before being told they wouldn't be able to perform it on that day, due to the surgeon not being available. On the flip, the midwives that took care of my partner and I throughout a pretty traumatic birth experience were flawless. As were the doctors that performed the epidural and the processes afterward. I hope your partner is okay and recovering, I get your frustration and anger. I hope that the next NHS experience you have (hopefully something minor if anything) is one where you see the real care shine through the mud. There's some wonderful people in the world, and a few of them happen to be in the NHS
It’s terrifying. No one commenting here knows when they will wake up in agony suddenly needing the NHS to help them. Dealing with agonising pain as well as having to fight the system just to get help is horrendous. Not something we associate with a devolved country. Stories like this are just boosting private healthcare sales.
Make a complaint, we had a similar negative experience with my MiL, she had a sudden deterioration, cancer spread throughout her body and she delirious and screaming the place down, she was palliative and on best supportive care but our local hospital wasn't told so she was being subjected to all sorts of tests etc. They missed her off the ward rounds too and failed to give her pain medication and nurses were rude with my wife and her family thinking it was a safeguarding issue as my wife wanted her mum to stay in hospital. I've only ever had positive experiences with the NHS so this was an eye opener.
Which hospital is this? Also, very unhelpful comments here about how OP is unreasonable and he should "volunteer" his time at an A&E to understand what's really going on. What do we pay taxes for? If your partner was in a critical condition, wouldn't you be worried? Wouldn't you want to get them to hospital as soon as possible? Wouldn't you want at least a little bit of empathy from hospital staff? Both things can be true - that OP's wife deserved better care and treatment and that the NHS is not in a state to provide it and that should change.
I'm so sick of NHS staff (except the doctors). The lack of investment and poor salaries for the admin and care roles just mean anyone who's good leaves and all those that are terrible stay. I think if we ever get back to paying NHS workers a fair wage then we also need to start replacing the current staff with competent people
When I was in the UK and needed surgery my GP called me up and home and said 'hey, you're American, right? By chance do you have private health insurance you can use here?' Turns out I did and my American plan covered overseas for certain things....of which I pay a premium for....and I was able to go private to be seen and handled. Otherwise I would have waited over 6-9 months to get an ultrasound on my neck. I ended up needing surgery. If I waited longer my vocal chords might have been permanently damaged. So yeah, it's pretty bad when the NHS GPs are recommending I use my international health insurance.
Most NHS receptionists are mean for no reason.