I understand he’s angry but he’s targeting it at the wrong people. People don’t tend to join the ambulance service to let people die, they are hamstrung by wait times at hospital A&Es, a lack of staff in hospitals and patients who could leave can’t because there’s nobody to care for them so a lack of available beds in hospitals. So to be angry at the ambulance service and not the Government who have curated this crisis in our health service seems backwards to me.
Why is he angry with the ambulance service and not with the government that is the cause for all this ?
Sorry. American here. Could he have called a taxi or Uber or something? If something happened to me my husband would drive me in. I don’t understand.
You vote for Tories, you get Tories. This country chose this fucking mess.
At the 1hour point I’m in an uber. Blame the government for this one.
Government ministers that are not qualified to run a department.
Now I understand it can be difficult to move an adult on your own but at some point you drag her to the car and go to hospital yourself, right?
People do know the government is actively not helping this situation so why are people being so ignorant about it?
Brexit, get it done…. This Tory government, promised the world, the world said f*k you, because the people of England and Wales voted to say f*k EU.
Have left your main customer the EU told them that they’re not wanted, relentlessly told immigrants you can’t work, and that there’s no money left, you’re left wondering why no one wants to stay here for a constant sh*t show.
At this rate the NHS will have to be privatised for pennies.
This happened in November last year and it’s unclear when the gentleman gave this interview.
I would say that blaming the NHS and it’s services is not what most people are doing at the moment. It’s an atypical view.
Don’t blame the NHS or Ambulance staff, the Blame lays with the Tories, no one else, just them.
In the timeframe of a 16hr period I would say you get a whole series of emotions. My thoughts way before the 16 hour mark would be the ambulance service are clearly stretched and I need to do something myself.
A) Taxi
B) Neighbor
C) Any physical way
I get the guy is hurting but sitting there waiting for over 16 hours. Do me a favour.
We are at Post-apocalyptic levels of healthcare were your have to treat yourself, go without and suffer or die waiting.
Stop voting Tory. Many more people will die under this government. They want to privatise the NHS so they are grinding it to dust. It’s time people in the UK stood up to them before we have a joke of a health care system like the US.
Anger should be laid firmly at the feet of those Tory bastards in power. Over 10 years of cuts and the way they were ‘supported’ in the pandemic has led us to this point, as much as the Daily Mail would have you believe otherwise.
I cannot put into words my utter loathing and hatred for the Conservative party.
If anyone’s still a Tory at this rate, they’re a selfish cunt that only gives a shit about themselves and their tax rates. Absolute rotten scum.
If there was an ambulance available they would have been there. It isn’t that people are working slowly because they’re lazy, it’s not ambulance drivers picking and choosing who they go to. The NHS has been gutted and starved of resources for a decade and then a pandemic hit, it is not the fault of people working in the NHS.
Not that 16 hours is right or anything but after like an hour wouldn’t you drive there yourself?
My 97 year old granddad waited 13 hours after he broke his hip just after Christmas. Not blaming the ambulance services though. Fuck the tories
It staggers me that someone would let his wife sit there for 16 hours instead of putting her in a car or taxi and taking her to A&E himself.
Pretty funny how so many of the comments are blaming this guy saying things like “should have got an Uber” or “should have driven her there himself”.
Have you ever considered that this guy might not have the money for an Uber or a taxi, and might not drive himself? My nearest hospital is a £65 taxi fare for me—just one way! You can’t blame a normal person for not being able to afford double (or more) that price. Obviously, in hindsight, he would have paid that. But that kind of money means not being able to pay your rent and when the ambulance service is being deceptive regarding how close it is, it makes sense that you’d wait. I’ve been there myself, but thankfully no-one died over it.
The Government have not done enough to reduce the stress on the NHS. I’ll provide one example.
I need emergency antibiotics. I need them because for the last 3 days I’ve been coughing up blood and have a long term history of lung infections. My NHS GP is overwhelmed by parents worried about STREP that they prioritised children over adults. I’ve had to access a private GP but due to the NHS’s refusal to share notes with the private GP services they are unable to prescribe antibiotics. This means I’m having to put stress on the NHS that could be avoided if private GPs had access to the same data or even just the allergies.
In the last 6 months I’ve had to visit the hospital for my lung condition because my GP surgery claims I’m okay when I’m literally coughing up blood. My chest consultant has written to the practice and told them to prescribe emergency medication immediately.
As yesterday was a bank holiday 111 was meant to call me back “within 1 hour 20 minutes.” The call never came.
I called my GP and got placed onto a triage list and was allocated a appointment later on in the day but after uploading the picture of my phlegm they called me back within 10 minutes to confirm I needed treatment.
I called my GP on the dot and 29 people where already in the queue.
I feel genuinely sorry for NHS staff your being overstretched!
The real crazy part of this is that social care has been eroded so badly by profit hungry private companies that old people who should be in homes or at home with care packages are filling up hospital beds for months at a time. The knock on effect to this is that younger people needing emergency care get passed over. It’s awful. I know people who work on “winter pressures wards” or “discharge wards” that are basically just working in NHS care homes for old people who can’t quite survive at home by themselves and can’t get or afford a place in a care home. There are old people sitting in nhs beds for months at a time who don’t actually need to be there but if they’re sent home with no care would end up back in the hospital in a few days. This has a huge knock on effect right down to A&E and then ambulance services. This is only going to get worse as our aging population gets older
The Tories have had the N.H.S.in the pot for 13 years, slowly turning up the heat and turning off the money. Gobshites keep voting Tory, this will keep happening until they can give the contracts to their friends. Just like the P.P.E. – you pay and they take the cream while your families die
Remember when you’d call an ambulance and you’d get one within 30 minutes?
pepperidge farm remembers…
And it’s not like we’re demanding some new and impressive modern service, we just want the same service that we used to get in the 00s from the same institution that used to deliverie it with the adiquate budget provided.
I wish there was a way to bash it through people’s thick fucking brains that we used to have this in a more socialised system and it went to shit due to capitalism. MORE CAPITALISM WON’T MAKE IT BETTER YOU FREAKING IDIOTS.
The corporate media are working really hard the last few days to do The Establishment’s* work for them, delivering scare stories about poor service delivery completely devoid of any context as to the reasons why. The BBC were even at it yesterday on 5Live with an hours long phone in. Shame on them.
We are sleep walking into losing the NHS, and this is not a problem we can vote ourselves out of. Direct action is needed urgently.
*you used to be able to label these as Tory-created crises, but sadly (New) Labour is just as much to blame for this mess and the current Shadow Health Secretary is already prostrating himself for private healthcare providers.
Horrible what is happening to NHS.
In this specific case, I feel context is important and hopefully lessons for others.
He called once, then once more 16 hours later. What happened after 2-3 hours?
After a few hours, knowing how shit everything is right now, it’s time to get a taxi. If me or my partner needs an ambulance right now, we’re driving.
My mum died in August last year. I know that was 5 months ago, but this situation was still around.
She’d been at my brothers for the weekend and came home early Sunday afternoon. She was fine, seemed happy enough and was telling me about her weekend. Mid afternoon she mentioned that she had a stomach ache. Early evening the stomach ache had got a lot worse, to the point of her screaming in pain.
I dialed 999 for an ambulance and one arrived within 20 minutes. They treated her as best they could, and took her in to hospital on blue lights at 10pm. She never came out. She died just after 9pm the next day. She was in resus the entire time, waiting for a bed in a ward. I was at home at the time, exhausted from lack of sleep. I got a call from the hospital at 9pm saying she’d just been transferred to a bed in a ward. I got another call at 9:10pm informing me she’d passed away in her sleep.
The ambulance crew were fantastic, they arrived quickly and did everything they could to help. The nurses in resus were fantastic, they did everything they could to make her comfortable and keep me informed about what was happening.
There are issues with the NHS, to deny that would be lying to yourself. It’s also nothing that a competent and willing government couldn’t fix if they wanted to.
I see a lot of comments about Tory cuts etc and that’s all well and good, but the root of the issue with the NHS is that there is an enormous aging population that has both complex and long lasting medical needs and social care isn’t working so they overstay in hospital and block that up as well.
Teresa May proposed a plan to pay for social care and was immediately ejected from power, and since then no one has dared bring it up again. The elderly don’t want to pay for their care, but neither do working age people.
We need to be talking about how to pay for social care, once that is operating properly then the NHS would be in significantly better shape
He shouldn’t be angry with YAS. I can guarantee that 100% of all ambulance staff (myself included) would rather be out there getting to their patients rather than be stuck queueing outside a hospital waiting to offload the unwell (somethings critically) patient that they have.
Trust me I bet YAS are angry as hell about this as well.
But it’s not the fault of the ambulance staff or the Service. It’s not the fault of the doctors and nurses in the hospital either.
It’s the fault of the government that has critically underfunded the NHS since they first got into power (regardless of what they tell everyone).
There is a human cost to the hatchet job that the Tories have done to the NHS. Stories like this come out more and more often, and everything gets framed in a way that blames the NHS and it’s staff but it is the amoral actions of government which is to blame – all they see are the billions they can individually make.
I had to go to A+E last week, was told it was a 7 hour wait for an ambulance. Couldn’t drive myself, my partner doesn’t drive, bus would have taken nearly 2 hours. None of my family live nearby. In the end she asked her work group chat if anyone could take me and her boss had to come and drive me there.
10 years ago you could get an ambulance in 10 minutes. Something has gone wrong.
There also needs to be much more awareness about what counts as an emergency. While i was in the waiting room vomiting into my Iceland bag a lady checked herself in because she “just wasn’t feeling very well”. Her words. Madam you have a cold, go home.
31 comments
I understand he’s angry but he’s targeting it at the wrong people. People don’t tend to join the ambulance service to let people die, they are hamstrung by wait times at hospital A&Es, a lack of staff in hospitals and patients who could leave can’t because there’s nobody to care for them so a lack of available beds in hospitals. So to be angry at the ambulance service and not the Government who have curated this crisis in our health service seems backwards to me.
Why is he angry with the ambulance service and not with the government that is the cause for all this ?
Sorry. American here. Could he have called a taxi or Uber or something? If something happened to me my husband would drive me in. I don’t understand.
You vote for Tories, you get Tories. This country chose this fucking mess.
At the 1hour point I’m in an uber. Blame the government for this one.
Government ministers that are not qualified to run a department.
Now I understand it can be difficult to move an adult on your own but at some point you drag her to the car and go to hospital yourself, right?
People do know the government is actively not helping this situation so why are people being so ignorant about it?
Brexit, get it done…. This Tory government, promised the world, the world said f*k you, because the people of England and Wales voted to say f*k EU.
Have left your main customer the EU told them that they’re not wanted, relentlessly told immigrants you can’t work, and that there’s no money left, you’re left wondering why no one wants to stay here for a constant sh*t show.
At this rate the NHS will have to be privatised for pennies.
This happened in November last year and it’s unclear when the gentleman gave this interview.
I would say that blaming the NHS and it’s services is not what most people are doing at the moment. It’s an atypical view.
Don’t blame the NHS or Ambulance staff, the Blame lays with the Tories, no one else, just them.
In the timeframe of a 16hr period I would say you get a whole series of emotions. My thoughts way before the 16 hour mark would be the ambulance service are clearly stretched and I need to do something myself.
A) Taxi
B) Neighbor
C) Any physical way
I get the guy is hurting but sitting there waiting for over 16 hours. Do me a favour.
We are at Post-apocalyptic levels of healthcare were your have to treat yourself, go without and suffer or die waiting.
Stop voting Tory. Many more people will die under this government. They want to privatise the NHS so they are grinding it to dust. It’s time people in the UK stood up to them before we have a joke of a health care system like the US.
Anger should be laid firmly at the feet of those Tory bastards in power. Over 10 years of cuts and the way they were ‘supported’ in the pandemic has led us to this point, as much as the Daily Mail would have you believe otherwise.
I cannot put into words my utter loathing and hatred for the Conservative party.
If anyone’s still a Tory at this rate, they’re a selfish cunt that only gives a shit about themselves and their tax rates. Absolute rotten scum.
If there was an ambulance available they would have been there. It isn’t that people are working slowly because they’re lazy, it’s not ambulance drivers picking and choosing who they go to. The NHS has been gutted and starved of resources for a decade and then a pandemic hit, it is not the fault of people working in the NHS.
Not that 16 hours is right or anything but after like an hour wouldn’t you drive there yourself?
My 97 year old granddad waited 13 hours after he broke his hip just after Christmas. Not blaming the ambulance services though. Fuck the tories
It staggers me that someone would let his wife sit there for 16 hours instead of putting her in a car or taxi and taking her to A&E himself.
Pretty funny how so many of the comments are blaming this guy saying things like “should have got an Uber” or “should have driven her there himself”.
Have you ever considered that this guy might not have the money for an Uber or a taxi, and might not drive himself? My nearest hospital is a £65 taxi fare for me—just one way! You can’t blame a normal person for not being able to afford double (or more) that price. Obviously, in hindsight, he would have paid that. But that kind of money means not being able to pay your rent and when the ambulance service is being deceptive regarding how close it is, it makes sense that you’d wait. I’ve been there myself, but thankfully no-one died over it.
The Government have not done enough to reduce the stress on the NHS. I’ll provide one example.
I need emergency antibiotics. I need them because for the last 3 days I’ve been coughing up blood and have a long term history of lung infections. My NHS GP is overwhelmed by parents worried about STREP that they prioritised children over adults. I’ve had to access a private GP but due to the NHS’s refusal to share notes with the private GP services they are unable to prescribe antibiotics. This means I’m having to put stress on the NHS that could be avoided if private GPs had access to the same data or even just the allergies.
In the last 6 months I’ve had to visit the hospital for my lung condition because my GP surgery claims I’m okay when I’m literally coughing up blood. My chest consultant has written to the practice and told them to prescribe emergency medication immediately.
As yesterday was a bank holiday 111 was meant to call me back “within 1 hour 20 minutes.” The call never came.
I called my GP and got placed onto a triage list and was allocated a appointment later on in the day but after uploading the picture of my phlegm they called me back within 10 minutes to confirm I needed treatment.
I called my GP on the dot and 29 people where already in the queue.
I feel genuinely sorry for NHS staff your being overstretched!
The real crazy part of this is that social care has been eroded so badly by profit hungry private companies that old people who should be in homes or at home with care packages are filling up hospital beds for months at a time. The knock on effect to this is that younger people needing emergency care get passed over. It’s awful. I know people who work on “winter pressures wards” or “discharge wards” that are basically just working in NHS care homes for old people who can’t quite survive at home by themselves and can’t get or afford a place in a care home. There are old people sitting in nhs beds for months at a time who don’t actually need to be there but if they’re sent home with no care would end up back in the hospital in a few days. This has a huge knock on effect right down to A&E and then ambulance services. This is only going to get worse as our aging population gets older
The Tories have had the N.H.S.in the pot for 13 years, slowly turning up the heat and turning off the money. Gobshites keep voting Tory, this will keep happening until they can give the contracts to their friends. Just like the P.P.E. – you pay and they take the cream while your families die
Remember when you’d call an ambulance and you’d get one within 30 minutes?
pepperidge farm remembers…
And it’s not like we’re demanding some new and impressive modern service, we just want the same service that we used to get in the 00s from the same institution that used to deliverie it with the adiquate budget provided.
I wish there was a way to bash it through people’s thick fucking brains that we used to have this in a more socialised system and it went to shit due to capitalism. MORE CAPITALISM WON’T MAKE IT BETTER YOU FREAKING IDIOTS.
The corporate media are working really hard the last few days to do The Establishment’s* work for them, delivering scare stories about poor service delivery completely devoid of any context as to the reasons why. The BBC were even at it yesterday on 5Live with an hours long phone in. Shame on them.
We are sleep walking into losing the NHS, and this is not a problem we can vote ourselves out of. Direct action is needed urgently.
*you used to be able to label these as Tory-created crises, but sadly (New) Labour is just as much to blame for this mess and the current Shadow Health Secretary is already prostrating himself for private healthcare providers.
Horrible what is happening to NHS.
In this specific case, I feel context is important and hopefully lessons for others.
He called once, then once more 16 hours later. What happened after 2-3 hours?
After a few hours, knowing how shit everything is right now, it’s time to get a taxi. If me or my partner needs an ambulance right now, we’re driving.
My mum died in August last year. I know that was 5 months ago, but this situation was still around.
She’d been at my brothers for the weekend and came home early Sunday afternoon. She was fine, seemed happy enough and was telling me about her weekend. Mid afternoon she mentioned that she had a stomach ache. Early evening the stomach ache had got a lot worse, to the point of her screaming in pain.
I dialed 999 for an ambulance and one arrived within 20 minutes. They treated her as best they could, and took her in to hospital on blue lights at 10pm. She never came out. She died just after 9pm the next day. She was in resus the entire time, waiting for a bed in a ward. I was at home at the time, exhausted from lack of sleep. I got a call from the hospital at 9pm saying she’d just been transferred to a bed in a ward. I got another call at 9:10pm informing me she’d passed away in her sleep.
The ambulance crew were fantastic, they arrived quickly and did everything they could to help. The nurses in resus were fantastic, they did everything they could to make her comfortable and keep me informed about what was happening.
There are issues with the NHS, to deny that would be lying to yourself. It’s also nothing that a competent and willing government couldn’t fix if they wanted to.
I see a lot of comments about Tory cuts etc and that’s all well and good, but the root of the issue with the NHS is that there is an enormous aging population that has both complex and long lasting medical needs and social care isn’t working so they overstay in hospital and block that up as well.
Teresa May proposed a plan to pay for social care and was immediately ejected from power, and since then no one has dared bring it up again. The elderly don’t want to pay for their care, but neither do working age people.
We need to be talking about how to pay for social care, once that is operating properly then the NHS would be in significantly better shape
He shouldn’t be angry with YAS. I can guarantee that 100% of all ambulance staff (myself included) would rather be out there getting to their patients rather than be stuck queueing outside a hospital waiting to offload the unwell (somethings critically) patient that they have.
Trust me I bet YAS are angry as hell about this as well.
But it’s not the fault of the ambulance staff or the Service. It’s not the fault of the doctors and nurses in the hospital either.
It’s the fault of the government that has critically underfunded the NHS since they first got into power (regardless of what they tell everyone).
There is a human cost to the hatchet job that the Tories have done to the NHS. Stories like this come out more and more often, and everything gets framed in a way that blames the NHS and it’s staff but it is the amoral actions of government which is to blame – all they see are the billions they can individually make.
I had to go to A+E last week, was told it was a 7 hour wait for an ambulance. Couldn’t drive myself, my partner doesn’t drive, bus would have taken nearly 2 hours. None of my family live nearby. In the end she asked her work group chat if anyone could take me and her boss had to come and drive me there.
10 years ago you could get an ambulance in 10 minutes. Something has gone wrong.
There also needs to be much more awareness about what counts as an emergency. While i was in the waiting room vomiting into my Iceland bag a lady checked herself in because she “just wasn’t feeling very well”. Her words. Madam you have a cold, go home.