I have been to A&E three times since Christmas.

1st was with a suspected broken 5th metacarpal, was told it was fine and to go home. Turned out to be a damaged ulnar nerve. I still don’t have full feeling in my little finger.

2nd was with a bad ankle, was told it was a sprain and to rest it. They did no x ray because I could walk. Turned out 5 months later to be a broken leg. Que surgery and a 5 month recovery period.

3rd was when my crutches broke after the op. I had a 3 hour wait and had to see a nurse before I could get replacement ones.

Neither of the incidences that caused the first two were very serious and certainly not emergencies, but they were definitely accidents and I felt they needed an xray and treating by professionals asap. I was right and unfortunately on both occasions didn’t get the treatment I needed. That won’t stop me from going back next time I feel I need to infact I will be more pushy about thinks like getting an xray etc.

The whole concept of the reliance on 12 hour shifts seems a bit strange to me.

As well as people being tired, especially if the shifts have been close together, it seems to me that some people work at a slightly reduced pace, almost on auto-pilot, just to ensure that they can maintain a half-decent level of concentration and decision making for the whole shift.

I may be wrong and comparing to a 12 hour programming stint, and it may be that the people interaction thing compensates somewhat.

I also can’t see it as good for the health of the staff.

Hooray for the NHS, definately.

Personally, when I broke my wrist on a Saturday night ride. I knew A and E would be busy with the regulars, so I rode home, went to sleep and just rolled in on Sunday morning when it was quiet.

I was seen very quickly, not much waiting about at all really.

as above. if you can wait until Sunday morning, you get great service.

I’ve also found dripping blood all over the waiting room to be pretty effective.

I’ve also found dripping blood all over the waiting room to be pretty effective.

😀

Even more effective if it’s from your head 🙂

people dread A&E due to the 4-5 hour sat waiting (this seems regardless of the number of people also waiting).

If you’ve waited 5 hours then your possibilties are:

1. It’s not serious so you keep getting pushed back to the end of the queue because people who are actually sick keep coming in.

2. You’re unluckly as it’s ususually busy and the staff numbers are insufficient. You should petition the government who keep ask for efficiency and demand they improve staff levels to cope with the busiest periods.

Of course not all hospitals are equal and weekend cover is not always as good as weekday cover.

TurnerGuy – shifts work ok in somewhere like A/E. Having done 12hr shifts and 24hr call with usually 5-6 hrs sleep onsite I would rather work 24 hrs – it seems daft but less handovers, more continuity and less antisocial to work too.

P.S. As above those who need to be seen in A/E pronto get seen pronto – like the three helicoptered in on Saturday….

Been to A&E and Walk In centre a few times over last 12 months with accident prone daughter. Got to say that apart from the waiting times being a little longer than I would have liked I have absolutely no complaints over the NHS at all. Fantastic bunch of people working under extreme conditions.

Last time I fainted was during a first aid course

I fainted watching an episode of Casualty 😳

What better place to feint pass out than next to a Dr?

If you’re my GF you can get you vaccinations to travel to africa in the morning, then as a delayed response faint in the afternoon in the queue for photos in the passport office, and carry a passport for the next 10 years with an attractive carpet burn on your face. Thats a good occasion for a faint.

Afraid to say it but the NHS in this country (or maybe it’s just my locality) is now frankly a joke. Most people dread A&E due to the 4-5 hour sat waiting (this seems regardless of the number of people also waiting). Or the 10 days wait to get an app to see the GP these days.
Terrible terrible service.

I always thought the NHS was rubbish until my son really needed it.

It isn’t.

Waiting 4-5 hours to get cut and scrapes fixed up is inconvenient but that’s about it.

The nhs is great.
Ok, you might have to wait a couple of hours, but then you get first class care.

my experience of the NHS is frankly shocking and in the last three years that includes GP, A&E, Hospital and Physio.

The care is atrocious at every level

my experience of the NHS is frankly shocking and in the last three years that includes GP, A&E, Hospital and Physio.

Still, it sounds like you got your money’s worth.

Most people dread A&E due to the 4-5 hour sat waiting (this seems regardless of the number of people also waiting). Or the 10 days wait to get an app to see the GP these days.

Yes I do dread sitting in A&E for 4-5 hours, hence why as suggested above if possible I schedule a visit for when they’re less busy (if I need to be seen more urgently then the chances are I’ll be prioritised and not have to wait that long). Or more likely nowadays I’ll just tootle along to the minor injuries clinic at the smaller local hospital where you’d be upset if you had to wait an hour to be seen. Alternatively you could always try turning up with a poorly small child – I’m pleased to report that in that case you do get seen rather quicker. Apologies if some poorly small child or somebody with a more urgent injury kept you waiting a bit longer – clearly the NHS would be far better if they gave everything the same priority in A&E.

Similarly whilst it can take as much as 10 days to get an appointment with my GP (the chap I prefer to visit doesn’t work many hours), that’s for a routine visit where such a wait is just an inconvenience. If I urgently need to see a GP then I can always get an appointment the same day. The only thing they could maybe do better is provide “intermediate urgency” appointments, where it’s not life or death to be seen that day, but you don’t want to wait a week – though to be fair I can usually be seen next day or the day after by a GP, just not my choice.

I’ve always been since within the hour (usually a lot less) when I’ve been to A&E with broken body bits, seeing the consultant a few days later can be a bit of a wait though but I just take a book along. And wrt GP’s I’ve never not got a same day appointment if I ring first thing in the morning and request one. I’ve just rang up to get an appointment for Friday – I have one 9.30 Friday morning. I think that the NHS is brilliant!

As NHS staff it’s nice to hear some positive experiences. And chuckling at ernie comment above.

I’ve worked 12 hours shifts for over 20 years now, they work really well for various reasons and don’t find I flag as it’s what were use to doing.

my experience of the NHS is frankly shocking and in the last three years that includes GP, A&E, Hospital and Physio.

The care is atrocious at every level

That’ very odd as both my Father and Brother have used the NHS at all those levels above plus HDU, Transplant team and Ambulances both over the last 3 years. They can not pray them enough or me who was present a lot of the time for my Father’s care after he took seriously ill. Even better their before alive and now have a prolonged life, I call that a result.

So maybe just maybe you had a few bad experiences and now blame the whole of the NHS.

my experience of the NHS is

sorry do i need to encase that in IME’s for the hard of thinking.

as regards comments above that if care is really lacking then complaint should be made through the appropriate channels, it was, I was then pushed to make my complaints formal, i did, nothing further.

In brief.
+4hrs from door to triage despite serious break, vomiting and repeated loss of consciouness, +3hrs for X-ray and analysis, 72hrs waiting for emergency surgery, during which time, lost records….. no meds….. missed surgery slots….
then it got worse time after time for outpatient/physio/GP

so again IME, IMrecentE, the NHS is overstretched and failling.
IMO people are too afraid to complain as they know it doesnt help and they will be shouted down by folk who cannot believe that nurses/doctors/surgeons are at best overworked and underappreciated and in reality underqualified and overrated.

you would be better off complaining about the police and crossing your fingers that your complaint is not placed in file 13.

soobalias out of interest what area are you in. As I’m sure everybody realises some trusts are better or worse than others. Is it not Stafford hospital that is almost constantly in the news for under performing and being terrible in general?

A quick google brings this up. I wouldn’t want a place like that to be my local.

in reality underqualified and overrated

Hang on – you think that the reason you had to wait four hours was because the doctors were incompetent?

😯

sorry do i need to encase that in IME’s for the hard of thinking.

Touchy little chap aren’t you, when you put this “The care is atrocious at every level” you kind of generalised the NHS as a whole. Kind of like when you put this “who cannot believe that nurses/doctors/surgeons are at best overworked and underappreciated and in reality underqualified and overrated.”

72 hours for surgery is an emergency time, I can’t account for the lost records that is rubbish.

4 hours for D and V with fainting is about right, as is 3 hours for X-ray analysis.

It’s a sad fact like any service there are failings and those that may not be great at their job.

I work in a surgical admissions unit – the place all emergency surgery referrals go after A&E/ED (if they don’t go to theatre/ITU first). We are very busy, 24/7 – and the system is pretty much at 100% capacity (i.e. there is very little slack in terms of bed occupancy). Believe me, staff on the frontline are doing their utmost to keep things together – most of my colleagues don’t take proper breaks & usually they go home late. Meanwhile, the new SouthWest NHS consortium cartel is actively seeking to reduce our pay, holiday and sick leave – the opening shot in a move away from national pay agreements. Quite frankly, it takes the pish – we are already working well beyond our contracted terms. And yes, that’s true of most lines of work these days & I’m not given to moaning about my lot…. but I’ve yet to hear a convincing explantion of how this will improve (or, at least, maintain) clinical outcomes. Some things go wrong because people don’t do their jobs properly – far more goes wrong because there simply ain’t enough boots on the gound. And that will ultimately manifest itself in missing notes, mis-communication, drug errors, lost theatre slots and all the rest.

The NHS is certainly not perfect, but those with valid concerns/complaints should be aware that the ConDem reforms will do little to improve the situation. The hiving-off of profitable activity and the fragmentation of services will simply serve to increase the pressure on acute care – be it A&E or elderly wards. To put it bluntly, Virgin, Serco, Circle etc depend upon the NHS shouldering the risk, even as they profit from it. It’s already happening – and now we have that joker Hunt in charge, the process is likely to accelerate. He’s typical of a political class for whom it has always been received-PPE-tutorial-wisdom that the service we provide is sh!te – although I suspect he’d last about five minutes if he actually had to work a shift himself. 😈

At its best and at its worst, it’s still your NHS (although probably not for much longer…) – be careful with it.

elzorillo – Member
Afraid to say it but the NHS in this country (or maybe it’s just my locality) is now frankly a joke. Most people dread A&E due to the 4-5 hour sat waiting (this seems regardless of the number of people also waiting). Or the 10 days wait to get an app to see the GP these days.

Terrible terrible service.

4-5 hour wait in A&E?…i’d suggest people dont need to be in A&E if they can manage to wait that long to be seen, exactly how much of an emergency is it?…really?
People under-use the local pharmacists who have excellent advice and training to dispense for minor ailments and loads of people go to A&E because they cant be bothered to make an appointment with their GP….then they wonder why they are sat in the waiting room for hours….thats what happens when you pitch up at A&E with a minor problem!

Turn up with a stroke, heart attack etc etc and it all swings into action nicely….funnily enough because thats what its geared up to do….but swamp the department with rubbish that would be better treated elsewhere and suddenly everybody whinges about waiting times.

Regards waiting to seeing a GP, change surgery as others have said…mine takes same day appointments…as they all should, most surgeries have a triage/duty DR on all day purely for telephone advice and same day appointments.
Other (better) surgeries will welcome you with open arms as they get more money for each patient registered with them.

I have worked in a GP surgery also, the amount of people seeing the DR for a common cold is staggering….would people do this if they had to pay when they booked the appointment?…i think not.
The NHS is a victim of its own success.

After leaving the UK for Canada{Alberta} I can honestly say the NHS is the dogs danglies and you should all feel privileged and grateful
we have longer wait times, longer wait lists, sketchy care and it took us nearly 2 years to get a decent GP after going on numerous waiting lists…..it seems to be the Doctors choose who to treat over here

I once had severe stomach pain. I was stable though, so I toughed it out til morning, hobbled to the doctors and sat in the waiting room looking like shite until I got seen. Which was about 20 mins after opening!

Worth remembering (although most people here seem clued up) that there is a middle ground between A&E and 10 days for a routine GP appointment.

4-5 hour wait in A&E?…i’d suggest people dont need to be in A&E if they can manage to wait that long to be seen, exactly how much of an emergency is it?…really?

OK – so where do you suggest going with a broken wrist for example?

I do get your point about people turning up there and at GPs who don’t really need to be there. You really get lots with a common cold? Personally I feel like I’m wasting the GPs time when I go there having been coughing for several weeks (though the advice is to go and get checked out at that point, and I probably actually leave stuff like that too long).

OK – so where do you suggest going with a broken wrist for example?

Complicated or normal?

If it looks pretty straight a minor injuries unit, if it’s a funny shape the emergency unit.

My experience of the NHS earlier this year after breaking my femur was nothing less than excellent.

Took about 20mins for the Ambulance to get to me, the Paramedics were all good humoured & treated me with care & efficiency got me to hospital as quickly as they could.

I arrived in the hospital at about 5pm, they got me into triage & gave me the good pain killing injections (the entonox & morphine weren’t really helping with the pain!) about 11am the next day they operated on my leg (after a couple trips to x-ray & x-ray operators not too happy about moving me around due to the obvious pain I was in!) then a cat scan to get a decent image of the break. 4 hours in surgery & I was back in on the ward recovering less than 24hrs after originally being bought in.

Since I’ve been released from hospital their after care, using my own gp surgery & another hospital for physio, have all been excellent.

I have nothing but praise for each & every person I’ve dealt with every step of the way.

However – I did see some people in the hospital who weren’t making life easy for themselves – they were obstructive, refusing to take their meds, not just questioning what they were for but actually refusing point blank & generally making the doctors & nurses lives difficult. So I sometimes wonder if peoples levels of care differs down to their attitude to those whom are doing the caring.

I’m sure there are places in the country that aren’t so good, and that had I had the same injury in a different area my experience might be totally different.

Meanwhile, the new SouthWest NHS consortium cartel is actively seeking to reduce our pay, holiday and sick leave – the opening shot in a move away from national pay agreements. Quite frankly, it takes the pish – we are already working well beyond our contracted terms.

Mate, my brother in law is the nicest, kindest bloke you could ever want to have a pint with. He started out as a male nurse and by hard work and night school worked his way up the hierarchy to the point where he is now the deputy GM of one of the hospitals in that consortium, currently standing in unwillingly for the GM who was sacked for incompetence. He is respected and admired at every level in the hospital because of his hard work, competence and firm manner and fantastic personality. His job is to reduce costs dramatically and the stress this is causing him is causing my sister and the rest of our family serious concern – he says he has to save millions but doesn’t want to make colleagues redundant. Most days he works well beyond 12 hours and comes home exhausted, but he has nobody to whom he can complain.

Just so you know, like.

Just so you know, like

I know full well – the stress goes all the way down the chain of command. And it’s sure as hell stressful on understaffed wards.

He has my every sympathy, but he has been placed in a ridiculous position – the consortium have effectively pooled resources so as to access top-flight legal advice, because they know they have one hell of a fight on their hands. Why, it might even be that we [the workforce] & our TACs are being softened up in readiness for “any willing provider” – and who, exactly, is driving that?

Interestingly, i’ve just come back from Southampton General for the weekend. I had a nasty asthma attack and managed to swallow a whole chunk of beef which kindly lodged itself in my esophagus, meaning I literally couldn’t swallow anything.

Took 48 hours to resolve, being shoved from pillar to post, to get an endoscopy, which to be fair was one of my more unpleasant experiences in life, after they ‘forgot’ to anaesthetise my throat before going wild with the big camera hose.

The only saving grace it’s resolved, even if I do feel beaten up inside.

Not a pleasant experience, with 2 friends who work as senior nurses there, I don’t know how, or why they put up with the stress & chaos. So much time wasted, so little progress, so many people moaning about the same things.

Is it not Stafford hospital that is almost constantly in the news for under performing and being terrible in general?

A quick google brings this up. I wouldn’t want a place like that to be my local.

Stafford is my local. Plenty of experience with self and kids, mixed in terms of quality of care there in the past to say the least, but definitely getting better now. Thankfully they are being reluctant to re-open full time until they are SURE they are capable of maintaining the service properly for the future. Care standards there were certainly very diferent to A & E departments in north wales and carlisle that we “visited” during the same period.

But for all that, we always came out healthier than we went in, so result!

NHS Rocks!

but not NHS dentistry….. that sucks the big one 🙁

“OK – so where do you suggest going with a broken wrist for example?”
Complicated or normal?

If it looks pretty straight a minor injuries unit

Sure – that’s where I’d go now, but they didn’t used to have X-ray (which was the reason I last went and waited 5 hours in A&E), and not everybody has easy access to one.

Just making the point that there are some things you do have to go and wait a long time in A&E for as they’re not emergencies, but that’s the only appropriate place to go. I don’t think things have changed so much in the 20 years since I went to my GP with a dodgy wrist and got referred on to A&E (didn’t go straight there as it was a very old thing – several years since the original injury – and both GP and A&E doctor agreed with my original self-diagnosis that it wasn’t broken, only to be surprised by the X-ray).

I’ve nearly fainted twice in A&E. Once i dislocated my collarbone playing football. Was clearly not right and needed A&E but rather than get an ambulance a mate drove me there. In an MG Midget. I got there Ok but by the time I was there it was excrutiatingly painful, and even though I could swing my legs out of the car I couldn’t get the momentum going to stand up out of it, so had to be lifted / pulled out by an orderly which made it worse, feeling the end of the jopint moving about. I stood in the queue, got to the front and was giving details to the receptionist but was acutely aware of feeling cold even though a drip of sweat was slowly rolling off my brow, down my nose and dripping onto her form. She got me into a cublicle just in time and we did the form later.

Other time I badly broke a finger (football again) leaving it twisted around. It needed straightening for which the doc gave me a ring block. He drew up a syringe with a needle about an inch long and delivered the line ‘some people find this a bit uncomfortable’ He put the needle about 3mm in and it stung a bit but no major issue, I thought. And then shoved the bloody thing in up to the hilt and started poking it about. But I manned up and took it. Then he took the thing out and delivered the killer line ‘right, now for the other side’. Room seemed to go blurry at that point and I had to lie down for a bit……

I’ve only done one trip to A&E (Coventry) and I thought it was pretty good, roughly 2 hours to be seen by all and diagnosed with a dislocated shoulder (which I knew) and a cracked humorous (which wasn’t) however they did miss the broken socket. They did a lot better than Bath the following morning (needed to go through the whole thing again to get a referral to the fracture clinic where I live (now that’s a waste of time, money and resources!) where they said that actually nothing was wrong at all and it was ‘probably a bit bruised’. Cheers for that then, I’ll go through the next six months of operations and rehab for a ‘bit of bruising’ shall I? I did get the referral to the fracture clinic for which I’m still waiting for my follow up appointment. I had my operation a year ago!

theotherjonv – Member

Other time I badly broke a finger (football again) leaving it twisted around. It needed straightening for which the doc gave me a ring block. He drew up a syringe with a needle about an inch long and delivered the line ‘some people find this a bit uncomfortable’ He put the needle about 3mm in and it stung a bit but no major issue, I thought. And then shoved the bloody thing in up to the hilt and started poking it about. But I manned up and took it.

Hah… When I sliced my finger up I got a rather sleep deprived doctor, who got a little distracted by a ruckus outside our cubicle mid ring-block and stuck the syringe right through my finger and sprayed the novocaine onto the tabletop Poor geezer, he was mortified, I had to more or less bully him into finishing the job and stitching me up, rather than going and getting forms for me to fill in just in case I wanted to sue.

Sure – that’s where I’d go now, but they didn’t used to have X-ray (which was the reason I last went and waited 5 hours in A&E), and not everybody has easy access to one.

You can get an X-ray referral at minor injury or walk in centre for the nearest one. And no not everywhere has these but there are lots of them now.