> …we now often have more than 100 patients in the department at any one time. Between 40 and 50 of them are “ready for transfer” – that is, waiting to move to a bed upstairs.
> But there aren’t enough beds and discharging patients who are medically ready to leave can be difficult. As a result, the wait time for an inpatient bed is around 48 hours and sometimes recently has hit 72 hours.
> We’re now in a position in our A&E where we are looking after a ward and a half of admitted patients, who take up the bedded spaces, while simultaneously running an emergency department out of the corridor and waiting room. Having to manage the very sick in inappropriate areas is now becoming the norm.
> Our overflow corridor never has fewer than 20 patients on it; people who are too unwell to sit in the waiting room. The corridor is made up of trolleys of patients lined up, top to toe, along a wall. It’s busy, it’s noisy and there’s no dignity there. Patients stuck there are being toileted behind staff holding up sheets on the corridor.
> As an example of the intense pressures EDs are under, we recently had to move a patient out of a cubicle to a corridor. That was so the person in the corridor, who was more critically unwell – who was dying in fact – could die anywhere other than a corridor.
> I’m suffering more moral injury now than I did at the height of Covid. That’s the feeling of helplessness people get when they abandon their moral beliefs in high-pressure situations.
That was hard to read. I live in fear now of any of my loved ones needing emergency hospital treatment and what that might look like. I know of someone fairly recently who had a heart attack and there was no ambulance, they were all literally sitting outside A&E with patients in them. Staff can’t go on like this much longer, the situation has become worse than bleak. Britain – racing to the bottom. Smh.
It’S jUsT pOoR sPeNdInG dEcIsIoNs We NeEd MoRe EfFiCiEnCy AnD cOsTcUtTiNg NoT mOrE fUnDiNg
(I just had yet another evening of this. Nothing will change until middle england loses that trope.)
I assume people remember the NHS practically closing down all but COVID and emergency care for over a year, a massive lack of referrals as GPs headed for the hills & some fool deciding to sack thousands of care workers because they would take the jabs. How’s everyone getting in now with their telephone doctors?
When the waiting room and corridors are full, they’ll have to get some of those shitty portacabins.
If people get charged 100 per a&e visit, will the queue gets shorter? Assuming it reduces faux and unnecessary visits and helps the queue.
I was admitted for a heart attack in November 2021 and it was the same. I spent 3 days on a gurney in a disused office off A&E waiting for a bed on a ward. In total it took over 5 days for me to get a from home to being admitted onto an acute cardiac ward and start getting treated. God knows what it’s like now.
In 2011 the same condition took 7 hours.
This is what the UK electorate have done to the country by repeatedly voting for the Tories.
The CEOs of all hospitals that are running with reduced staff and or facilities at this point should grow some balls and close the doors. They have a duty of care to employees to which they are grossly failing.
This has been the norm in Canada for the past 10 years. Sad to see it starting here.
9 comments
> …we now often have more than 100 patients in the department at any one time. Between 40 and 50 of them are “ready for transfer” – that is, waiting to move to a bed upstairs.
> But there aren’t enough beds and discharging patients who are medically ready to leave can be difficult. As a result, the wait time for an inpatient bed is around 48 hours and sometimes recently has hit 72 hours.
> We’re now in a position in our A&E where we are looking after a ward and a half of admitted patients, who take up the bedded spaces, while simultaneously running an emergency department out of the corridor and waiting room. Having to manage the very sick in inappropriate areas is now becoming the norm.
> Our overflow corridor never has fewer than 20 patients on it; people who are too unwell to sit in the waiting room. The corridor is made up of trolleys of patients lined up, top to toe, along a wall. It’s busy, it’s noisy and there’s no dignity there. Patients stuck there are being toileted behind staff holding up sheets on the corridor.
> As an example of the intense pressures EDs are under, we recently had to move a patient out of a cubicle to a corridor. That was so the person in the corridor, who was more critically unwell – who was dying in fact – could die anywhere other than a corridor.
> I’m suffering more moral injury now than I did at the height of Covid. That’s the feeling of helplessness people get when they abandon their moral beliefs in high-pressure situations.
That was hard to read. I live in fear now of any of my loved ones needing emergency hospital treatment and what that might look like. I know of someone fairly recently who had a heart attack and there was no ambulance, they were all literally sitting outside A&E with patients in them. Staff can’t go on like this much longer, the situation has become worse than bleak. Britain – racing to the bottom. Smh.
It’S jUsT pOoR sPeNdInG dEcIsIoNs We NeEd MoRe EfFiCiEnCy AnD cOsTcUtTiNg NoT mOrE fUnDiNg
(I just had yet another evening of this. Nothing will change until middle england loses that trope.)
I assume people remember the NHS practically closing down all but COVID and emergency care for over a year, a massive lack of referrals as GPs headed for the hills & some fool deciding to sack thousands of care workers because they would take the jabs. How’s everyone getting in now with their telephone doctors?
When the waiting room and corridors are full, they’ll have to get some of those shitty portacabins.
If people get charged 100 per a&e visit, will the queue gets shorter? Assuming it reduces faux and unnecessary visits and helps the queue.
I was admitted for a heart attack in November 2021 and it was the same. I spent 3 days on a gurney in a disused office off A&E waiting for a bed on a ward. In total it took over 5 days for me to get a from home to being admitted onto an acute cardiac ward and start getting treated. God knows what it’s like now.
In 2011 the same condition took 7 hours.
This is what the UK electorate have done to the country by repeatedly voting for the Tories.
The CEOs of all hospitals that are running with reduced staff and or facilities at this point should grow some balls and close the doors. They have a duty of care to employees to which they are grossly failing.
This has been the norm in Canada for the past 10 years. Sad to see it starting here.