Elderly patient dies after 52-hour A&E wait without medication

8 comments

1. My Nan is currently still in A&E after 5 DAYS. It’s ridiculous. They finally found her a bed at least and have been doing some tests, but she’s not well enough to discharge but no space at all on the wards.

   The state of affairs is completely unacceptable, it’s not a free service most of us pay a lot of money for it, they need to sort it out.

2. Uk cannot afford to let anymore illegal immigrant coming in

3. In Liverpool you’ve gotta go to a walk in center beofee you go to a&e given its not actually somthing major!
   If you onto a&e with something minor they’ll turn you away of you haven’t been to a walk in

4. I’m sure they were offered a paracetamol, everyone gets offered a paracetamol

5. This is so so sad. Parkinson’s is a critical medicine and it’s disappointing at best and criminal at worst that this A&E didn’t have a process for identifying people on critical medications.

   If a patient misses a single dose of a Parkinson’s med, or it’s late by 1hr+, their symptoms can worsen for weeks. It can take weeks to return to their “normal”.

   He should’ve been seen by the Parkinson’s Team in the corridor at the very least. I hope this hospital learns from this entirely avoidable error. There’s nothing they can do in terms of beds and corridor care, but patients should still receive their regular medications in the corridor. They’ll probably be a bit delayed due to the sheer number of patients, but prioritisation is a large part of nursing and he should’ve been at the top of the list for medication rounds.

   It seems like the lack of joined-up services and an overwhelmed A&E are the cause of this. A&Es should be able to get access to people’s prescription records. Why was his GP record wrong? This poor man was failed multiple times

6. Privatize it. Public free healthcare doesn’t work anymore. Throwing more money doesn’t work anymore. Nobody has any other solutions out there. We know a small fee will stop people from clogging up A&E unnecessarily. And before comment “oh but think of how morally wrong it is to pay for healthcare” do you have any other radical solution? How much more money do we need sink in? £10/20/50 billion pounds?

7. It was only 2.1 days. How could of A&E possibly respond in time?

8. This is going to get worse and worse. And tbh I think it’s because we’re incorrectly assuming the problem is in the NHS.

   I was in a ward for two weeks and it was extremely eye-opening as to what the problem was to me. Almost every person on the ward was 85+, and almost all of them no longer needed to be there but couldn’t be moved on because either there wasn’t any space in care homes available for them or their relatives weren’t willing/able to take them.

   Reality is we’re not equipped to deal with an ageing population, and by that I don’t mean people 65-85 or so but 85+. Everyone that age has a ridiculous range of medical issues and relatives don’t have the capacity to deal with them, especially with how stressful and busy modern life already is. And care homes are ridiculously full and of course ridiculously expensive.so hospitals are basically becoming glorified care homes up and down the country.

   There’s not an easy answer to this. We cannot just keep increasing the size of the NHS to become an ever larger care home. The whole situation is untenable. I have no answer for this. One bit of advice I always give though is to think about whether A&E is the best place to go (when I’ve been there there’s been loads of people who shouldn’t have been there) – a call to 111 or a visit to a walk in centre is very often the best first point of contact with the NHS for issues. I’ve always had good experiences with 111 and been seen by a doctor within a couple of hours of calling, far faster than I would’ve been with A&E.

   All I will say though is that if you’re young with a major medical issue, that’s when the NHS kicks into gear. I’ve had two major issues (one with me and one with my daughter) and in both cases they were brilliant and did the best they could. Even though it’s not explicitly stated but the NHS is clearly prioritising their resources to younger people with medical issues and tbh that’s the way I think it should be as they’re the ones with the most ‘QUALYs’ left. Obviously some young people still have terrible experiences either way the NHS but generally speaking most younger people I know have positive experiences.

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