The Lemon Fool

My father-in-law (in his 80's) took ill the other night with a suspected stroke.
M-i-l called the emergency services and they said he would have to go to A & E.
They called for an ambulance (they dont drive) and it took 2 hours to arrive.
We were at A & E since 345 and waited over 7 hours before he was seen ie over 7 hours wait for an elderly fellah with dementia- and this in the middle of a 'quiet night' on a supposedly quiet shift. There's a shortage of staff, apparently.
The NHS nurses and reception were great, reassuring and providing tea and toast for the rapidly filling A&E hall.
However they are clearly understaffed, undervalued and underpaid Its only having visited the coalface I realise how broken the NHS is.

Its like the justice system which is also broken- but that's a rant for another time.

Sheeeshh.

Beerpig wrote:My father-in-law (in his 80's) took ill the other night with a suspected stroke.
M-i-l called the emergency services and they said he would have to go to A & E.
They called for an ambulance (they dont drive) and it took 2 hours to arrive.
We were at A & E since 345 and waited over 7 hours before he was seen ie over 7 hours wait for an elderly fellah with dementia- and this in the middle of a 'quiet night' on a supposedly quiet shift. There's a shortage of staff, apparently.
The NHS nurses and reception were great, reassuring and providing tea and toast for the rapidly filling A&E hall.
However they are clearly understaffed, undervalued and underpaid Its only having visited the coalface I realise how broken the NHS is.

Its like the justice system which is also broken- but that's a rant for another time.

Sheeeshh.

I'm sorry to hear that and hope your f-i-l makes a good recovery. AIUI timely treatment for a stroke has a significant impact on the level of recovery, it isn't something one would wish to be delayed. Having heard a few views from those who work 'on the coalface' it's the working conditions that are the main cause of staff shortages. People will work for relatively low pay but if the working conditions are poor then they are less inclined to do so. Something of a vicious circle IMO.

RC

I hope your FIL recovers well.

I spent 3 hours waiting for an ambulance on the pavement with my mum (88), who fell face first and broke & dislocated her wrist. Consensus was not to move her due to concerns about ribs/pelvis etc...

I have since realised that I should have pushed her 3 feet into the road as she fell. Who has ever, and I mean ever, seen a delay in prioritising an ambulance to an incident in the road with police attending. The separate RTA ambulance service seems well funded and generally prompt...

Beerpig wrote:My father-in-law (in his 80's) took ill the other night with a suspected stroke.
M-i-l called the emergency services and they said he would have to go to A & E.
They called for an ambulance (they dont drive) and it took 2 hours to arrive.
We were at A & E since 345 and waited over 7 hours before he was seen ie over 7 hours wait for an elderly fellah with dementia- and this in the middle of a 'quiet night' on a supposedly quiet shift. There's a shortage of staff, apparently.
The NHS nurses and reception were great, reassuring and providing tea and toast for the rapidly filling A&E hall.
However they are clearly understaffed, undervalued and underpaid Its only having visited the coalface I realise how broken the NHS is.

Not nice, being exposed to the messy realities behind the waiting lists.

Some classes of people should imho be charged for their A&E treatment .... drunks, drugs users, the fat, but then there's the old.
There are more and more of us, and it's hard to think of a charging model, especially given that we vote.
Money insulates us from many NHS woes, but there are very few private A&E units and they only treat minor issues.

My wife has marginal high blood pressure, inherited from her father, she is at the statin or not statin threshhold.
If she has a stroke I shall immediately give her the obvious first aid of 300mg of aspirin, if I'm around and if I can remember where she's put them, but of course one hopes it will never happen.

Wish your FiL well.

V8

I was actually thinking recently that there have not been so many media stories about a "winter crisis" in the NHS compared to the last few years. I thought maybe that was due to the decline of Covid and this not being a bad flu year.

But maybe it is just not news any more when patients have to wait for hours?

I lost my best friend just before Christmas, she had been receiving outpatient care from the hospital for bronchitis and fluid on the lungs. A paramedic had been out to see her and advised her brother to take her into hospital by car as it was unlikely an ambulance would attend as there was no bleeding. Sadly after a nine hour wait sitting in a hard chair in a public waiting area amongst drunks, drug users etc. she collapsed and died. As she had been receiving treatment as am outpatient there was no inquest and the death certificate just stated 'heart failure' as the cause of death.

The £122 million pounds is still missing from the local health authority and there is still no explanation as to where it has gone.

R6

Rhyd6 wrote:I lost my best friend just before Christmas, she had been receiving outpatient care from the hospital for bronchitis and fluid on the lungs. A paramedic had been out to see her and advised her brother to take her into hospital by car as it was unlikely an ambulance would attend as there was no bleeding. Sadly after a nine hour wait sitting in a hard chair in a public waiting area amongst drunks, drug users etc. she collapsed and died. As she had been receiving treatment as am outpatient there was no inquest and the death certificate just stated 'heart failure' as the cause of death.

The £122 million pounds is still missing from the local health authority and there is still no explanation as to where it has gone.

R6

I heard about the missing money. In Scotland such things seem to find their way into campervans. Are there any in the hospital carpark registered under the name of Betsy Cadwalader?

Rhyd6 wrote:I lost my best friend just before Christmas, she had been receiving outpatient care from the hospital for bronchitis and fluid on the lungs. A paramedic had been out to see her and advised her brother to take her into hospital by car as it was unlikely an ambulance would attend as there was no bleeding. Sadly after a nine hour wait sitting in a hard chair in a public waiting area amongst drunks, drug users etc. she collapsed and died. As she had been receiving treatment as am outpatient there was no inquest and the death certificate just stated 'heart failure' as the cause of death.

The £122 million pounds is still missing from the local health authority and there is still no explanation as to where it has gone.

R6

My condolences. What an awful way to lose a Best Friend.

Thanks Mike4, we'd been friends since we lay side by side in the baby clinic so to speak. We started primary school together and had remained friends ever since. She was Godmother to my children and we all miss her like hell.

R6

My deepest condolences too Rhyd. I hope as many of us as possible can avoid unexpected trips to any hospital now.

Certainly gives rise to an unfortunate question. Should we all be paying more tax ?

Firstly - I hope your F-i_L is as well as he can be now.

My son recently had a concern over possibly contracting polio (he'd been working in a live polio laboratory the week before and felt very very unwell, coughing blood etc).

I took him to A&E - we got there about 2230. The sign said a 5 hour wait.
An hour later it said 8 hour wait, so he told me to go home.
I collected him the next day (no polio! as expected but ... y'know. Very bad chest infection...)

In all that time A&E had at least 40 people waiting ... and he said the majority of them were really suffering some variation of a MH issue rather than a physical health issue.

As the OP, the staff were great, though the Doctor, when he saw him eventually, wasn't very happy to learn that a potential polio carrier had been left for several hours in a room full of vulnerable patients by the triage team....

88V8 wrote:Some classes of people should imho be charged for their A&E treatment .... drunks, drugs users, the fat, but then there's the old.
V8

... motorcyclists, mountain climbers, contact sports players, horse riders, those that do no exercise, swimmers ... maybe also then?

stockton wrote:Certainly gives rise to an unfortunate question. Should we all be paying more tax ?

This.

The expectation of a Scandinavian level of social provision on US levels of tax ...

stockton wrote:Certainly gives rise to an unfortunate question. Should we all be paying more tax ?

Or should we be forgetting the fanciful notion that the NHS can remain totally free at point of use.

And then there's things the NHS spends money treating that we might think it shouldn't and drugs that it's been forced by the courts to offer free for things of which we might disapprove, and the £70mio it spends every year on translation services for foreigners... it rapidly becomes heated and political so it's not hard to see why politicians just tinker around the edges.

A friend of ours - 85yo and not wealthy - is paying £7,000 to have a prostate-related op privately next week, so as to avoid the shambles of the NHS, where he has had two very bad experiences in a leading hospital in a county that is not on the bread line, a hospital where first-world medicine is conducted in a shambles far removed from the halcyon days of Sir Lancelott Spratt.

V8

stockton wrote:Certainly gives rise to an unfortunate question. Should we all be paying more tax ?

Not really.

What we should do is purge the NHS of lawyers and [expletive deleted] management.

The kind of bureaucracy that kept me occupying a bed (that I didn't need nor want) for four nights about ten years ago because their processes simply didn't allow me to go home for the night and come back in the morning for tests (that I did want).

Or the tying up for two hours/week of all the consultant oncologists in a big regional hospital in a weekly meeting whose sole purpose was box-ticking to cover the hospital's [expletive deleted] against getting sued.

[edit] Oh-dear. I hadn't realised that covering ones posterior was going to trigger lemonfool's expletive filter. Would Nanny rather see indecent exposure here?

didds wrote:

stockton wrote:Certainly gives rise to an unfortunate question. Should we all be paying more tax ?

This.

The expectation of a Scandinavian level of social provision on US levels of tax ...

and with agreement on other points above above to some extent at least.

didds

UncleEbenezer wrote:What we should do is purge the NHS of lawyers and [expletive deleted] management.

It may surprise fellow Fools that I agree wholeheartedly. The cost of litigation in the NHS is absolutely staggering.

The area where the most claims arise is obstetrics. According to a recent report in The Times, in 2021/22, the latest figures available, NHS England spent £3 billion on maternity and neonatal services. But it spent getting on for three times that amount - £8.2 billion - on litigation and compensation.

Part of the reason for these huge figures is the Alice in Wonderland way that compensation is calculated. If a child is born and suffers a serious brain injury as a result of medical negligence it's not just the cost of care and treatment that's awarded, it's things like the amount of money the child could have been expected to earn during its lifetime.

This involves truly surreal assessments that take into account such factors as what level of education and jobs its parents have, what sort of school it might have been expected to attend and what educational achievements it might have made, leading in turn to what career it might have taken up in order to calculate its lost earnings.

Such assessments are nothing short of ridiculous, as there is so much conjecture that one might as well generate a number at random. However, as they are carried out by lawyers and armies of other experts all charging hundreds of pounds an hour they are incredibly expensive. It's not unusual to see claimants' legal bills well in excess of £1m.

Legal costs are also grossly disproportionate. In lower value claims they are typically twice as much as the amount of compensation.

Of course the lawyers can't be blamed for taking advantage of a system that allows them to do so, but the system badly needs to be changed.

For many years I've advocated that lawyers should basically be taken out of the equation, and that instead of having to prove negligence on the part of practitioners there should be a `no fault' scheme, where the Government simply provides medical care and compensation for anyone who suffers as a result of medical treatment. This would free up all the money currently paid to lawyers on both sides for medical care, and would also help reduce the stress and misery of litigation that claimants and their families have to cope with on top of the basic medial problems.

Other countries, such as Japan, New Zealand and Sweden have already adopted such schemes, and they appear to work well. Unfortunately, the legal profession in the UK carries a great deal of clout in high places, and has so far successfully fought tooth and nail to protect such a valuable gravy train, so I'm sad to say that the chances of such a scheme ever being introduced are probably minimal.

Clitheroekid wrote:Other countries, such as Japan, New Zealand and Sweden have already adopted such schemes, and they appear to work well. Unfortunately, the legal profession in the UK carries a great deal of clout in high places, and has so far successfully fought tooth and nail to protect such a valuable gravy train, so I'm sad to say that the chances of such a scheme ever being introduced are probably minimal.

It is even worse in the US, as I feel sure that you know.

All attempts at tort reform there are opposed aggressively by the ABA and their friends in high places in the Democrat party.

didds wrote:

88V8 wrote:Some classes of people should imho be charged for their A&E treatment .... drunks, drugs users, the fat, but then there's the old.
V8

... motorcyclists, mountain climbers, contact sports players, horse riders, those that do no exercise, swimmers ... maybe also then?

Well yes actually, IMO. Everyone should make a notional contribution towards their treatment. say £50. Just like they do to their NHS dental treatment. It would cut down massively on the trivial, time-wasting stuff. One of the bell-ringers here was telling us the other day about the nuisance call-outs their partner gets routinely as an ambulance driver and 'first responder'. One such 'patient' has learned how to get priority attention and an top priority ambulance visit several times a week. They call up and say they think their heart has stopped beating and this gets them straight to the front of the emergency queue. Their heart is fine when the crew get there and the phone staff recognise this caller but are in no position to deny them a priority visit, while real deserving callers have to wait while this charade is played out repeatedly.