COVID: Over 20 NHS trusts declare critical incident as health service ‘stretched like never before’ amid Omicron surge

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  4. All going according to plan as far as Boris is concerned then as he continues the decades of Tory plans to kill off the NHS and sell what’s left to the private sector.

    Is it really any coincidence that Sunak was just in the States meeting with their private healthcare providers before his trip got cut short?

    It’s a fucking joke and yet thanks to the media only pushing the problems and keeping dead quiet of the reasons for the problems the majority of the fucking blind public will cheer Boris as he claims to “save the NHS” by getting the private sector to take it all over, I bet he uses something like “It’s clear the NHS cannot cope with the demands and pressures of modern times which is why we need the agile private sector to take it over”

    Fucking sick of all these cunts, both in the government and in the media pushing this BS and ignoring telling the public about the real causes

  6. I’m currently sitting in A&E as a patient (sent here by GP for shortness of breath)

    There are approx 70 people ahead of me and the staff are running around trying to do their best but the hospital has gone beyond crisis and is broken now – I overheard the staff say as much but it’s pretty obvious even to my untrained eye.

  7. Our trust has declared several over the last few weeks, mostly due to staff isolating, which prevents care of patients being admitted but also discharge of healthy patients as the backlog builds up. COVID admittance is not a significant issue for us, however it adds to an already overburdened system that struggles to cope at the best of times. We hear about the NHS being in crisis every year, however that just shows how we ignore the problem every year and hope it will sort itself out through goodwill and clapping.

  8. My mother just had her hip replaced. She’s only 62, fit and healthy otherwise. She was very active until it basically gave out. Now, just 4 weeks on, she’s mostly back to how she was.

    I’m so glad this gift wasn’t stolen from her by some unvaccinated cunt bed blocking because they’re special and the rules don’t apply to them. My heart goes out to people missing similar needed treatments who now can’t have them.

  9. Just search these in google:

    NHS overwhelmed 2010

    NHS overwhelmed 2011

    NHS overwhelmed 2012

    NHS overwhelmed 2013

    NHS overwhelmed 2014

    and so on… quite a few “like never before”

  10. When are we going to wake up to the fact the NHS is a pile of wank. Yes it is staffed by heroes but as an organisation it’s mismanaged, bloated and not fit for purpose.

  11. The pressure on the NHS is coming largely from two things:

    – People who don’t need to be there any more but have nowhere to be sent “home”. (This isn’t a new problem, it happens all the time.) See /u/SMURGwastaken’s thread. This can be addressed with Nightingale outpatient wards to free up space in the real hospitals until the surge is over.
    – Isolation rules for asymptomatic or mild cases. This never happens for any other disease – how does the NHS deal with other respiratory illnesses, especially flu? This can be addressed by finding things it’s safe for non-ill Covid positive people to do, possibly with suitable PPE (this is one area where masks actually will make a significant difference).

    Cases and hospitalisations look like they’re flattening out so hopefully that shouldn’t need to be the case for long.

    And of course in the medium term we need to look at NHS spending – both the headline budget and how it’s deployed – so it isn’t running along at the limits of what it can deal with every winter. There are “NHS in crisis” headlines every winter, at least every bad flu season, and that is because we don’t have the capacity we need to deal with the known unknowns.

  12. Last night I covered the elderly unit in my hospital because their staffing levels were dangerously low. An elderly gentleman with dementia had a fall at around tea time, and his obs showed low blood pressure and unilateral abnormal miosis of the pupils (the one on the side where he had hit his head wasn’t responding to light basically) which could indicate a bleed on the brain and needs swift medical attention. The unit is on the mental health wards, so our staff are not equipped to deal with serious physical ailments, and the trust policy is that they must be transferred to A&E by ambulance. So of course we call one straight away and try to see to his needs as best as possible with the help of the on call psychiatrist. We called at tea time. I just finished my shift at 8, about 45 minutes ago, and the ambulance still hadn’t arrived.

    I’ve never in all my life known wait times to be as bad as they are. I’ve got colleagues who have been in this far longer who have never seen anything like it. To all the idiots saying, “this happens every winter”, shut the fuck up, no it doesn’t. It’s never been this bad. It’s a nightmare, and if you want to see for yourself come pick up some shifts and try your hand at being an NA for a a few shifts and experience how fucking stressful it is.

    And to all those saying we don’t isolate like this for the flu, I wonder how comfortable you’d be if that gentleman I talked about here was your grandad, and whilst experiencing a significant medical event, on top of being made to wait a disturbingly long time , was being cared for by a covid positive nurse. Would you be happy with that? Stop comparing it to the flu, it’s not the flu. The agony these people are dying in when this illness hits you hard is nothing like dying from the fucking flu.

    If you aren’t there, and you don’t actually know what’s happening in our hospitals right now, then please just stop talking utter shite. You have no clue.

    Sincerely

    A pissed off and stressed out NHS worker.

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