40-hour ambulance waits

[DealorNoDeal]

how do you fix that?

Emergency ambulances only for serious accidents (RTA etc), life threatening injuries or real medical emergencies (CA, stroke)?

[DealorNoDeal]

I wonder how much of the problem is down to bed blocking?

When my wife was in hospital 9 years ago, there were more dementia patients on her surgical ward than patients recovering from surgery. The nurses said the hospital was having problems finding anywhere to discharge them to, hence why they were "dumped" on a surgical ward.

I don't imagine the situation has got any better since.

[Paddy]

You can get an ambulance in London within six hours, but it has to come from Calais.
https://ambulance-vsl-calais.fr/nos-...conventionnes/

[vetran]

I wonder how much of the problem is down to bed blocking?

When my wife was in hospital 9 years ago, there were more dementia patients on her surgical ward than patients recovering from surgery. The nurses said the hospital was having problems finding anywhere to discharge them to, hence why they were "dumped" on a surgical ward.

I don't imagine the situation has got any better since.

nope worse

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/a...st-trusts.html

A THIRD of NHS capacity is taken up by bed-blockers at busiest trusts: Analysis lays bare scale of £2bn-a-year crisis which Therese Coffey has vowed to fix... so use our handy interactive tool to see how bad the problem is at YOUR hospital

• Analysis of data shows 13,000 beds, about a seventh of NHS capacity in England is taken up by bed-blockers
• This rises to one in three beds being used by a patient fit to leave in some of the nation's hardest hit hospitals
• Bedblocking is contributing to distressing A&E and ambulance waits and the NHS's enormous care backlog
• Problem has been blamed on social care which is beset by staffing issues as supermarkets offer higher wages
• MailOnline's analysis comes after new Health-Sec Therese Coffey pledges £500million to help fix the crisis

Of course we have an international NHS

https://fullfact.org/health/health-t...-and-who-pays/

Deliberate use: This is the estimated cost of treating those travelling to England deliberately for free treatment, or those who take advantage of the health system while here (which means using it more intensively than they might have done otherwise). This group is particularly difficult to quantify as we don't really know who most of them are. It's thought they could cost the NHS somewhere between £110 million and £280 million a year, on top of the £1.8 billion a year.

https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/b...irth-in-london

[d000hg]

We, the tax payer, is paying for the army bods. They are trained, so why can't we use them to help out?

I suppose partly there is the optics of it (which I couldn't care less about but being realistic is a factor). Beyond that, well what specifically would they do? If there is a 24 hour queue of ambulances waiting at the hospital, getting patients to the hospital faster is a minimal gain and presumably there is a shortage of ambulances anyway if they're all stacked up.

The military do have their own hospitals and medical staff and they certainly have the ability to basically do instant pop-up hospitals but is emergency field medicine of the same level as the NHS.

It really is startling how bad it has all gotten. We grow up taking for granted that while there may be long waiting lists, you will get seen in a real emergency and you won't die because they couldn't get to you. But not the case. It's actually affecting some decisions I make knowing that the consequences could be far more significant, or at least making be consider more explicitly the risks.

[DealorNoDeal]

At the moment, discharge is either home or care home. What we need is something like the old convalescent hospitals.

The chap down the road is a case in point. He's been in hospital (bed blocking) for 6 weeks. He has mobility issues after surgery for a fractured tibia, so couldn't go home but he doesn't need to stay in hospital; nor does he need to go to a care home.

[sadkingbilly]

[QUOTE=d000hg;n4244706 It's actually affecting some decisions I make knowing that the consequences could be far more significant, or at least making be consider more explicitly the risks.

[/QUOTE]

i thought your god would look after you?

[d000hg]

i thought

No you didn't. What an utterly moronic comment to make. Please don't jump into conversations just to make silly insults.

[sadkingbilly]

No you didn't. What an utterly moronic comment to make. Please don't jump into conversations just to make silly insults.

or what? you get your little god to smite me? you don't own this forum pal, much as you think you do.

[psychocandy]

Emergency ambulances only for serious accidents (RTA etc), life threatening injuries or real medical emergencies (CA, stroke)?

Alas we live in a society where we're scared to say no to people just in case....