Millions of patients were urged Wednesday not to go to A&E unless they are dying after six trusts warned of waits of up to 12 hours in emergency departments. MailOnline has more.
Trusts across Yorkshire claimed the pressures have left them with no choice but to prioritise patients in “genuine, life-threatening situations”.
West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts, which covers 2.5million people, said its casualty units were “extremely busy”. Figures show there has been a “sharp uplift” in patients attending over A&E over the past fortnight, with the total number of visits up 14% on the same time last year.
Meanwhile, in another sign of the constant pressure NHS medics are facing, South Central Ambulance Service – one of the largest trusts of its kind in the U.K. – declared a critical incident this morning, telling patients to make their own way to hospital unless their injuries or illnesses are not serious.
The service, which covers seven million residents across Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Sussex and Surrey, asked the community to only call 999 in an emergency.
Their warnings came as millions of Britons started paying more national insurance from today, with Boris Johnson insisting the 1.25% hike is ‘necessary’ to bail out the NHS and social care in the wake of the pandemic. The Prime Minister insisted it was the “right thing for the NHS”, which has seen waiting lists spiral to a record high after hospitals were forced to cancel thousands of operations during the pandemic.
Ministers insist the tax rise, tagged the Health and Social Care Levy, is needed to help tackle Covid backlogs and reform the adult social care system – raising £39 billion over the next three years.
But health chiefs warned the service is already behind schedule in its routine care recovery plan because of rising numbers of Covid patients. More than 16,500 hospital beds are currently occupied by infected people in England, similar to levels seen during the worst part of the Omicron wave in January.
Chris Hopson, head of NHS Providers, said the rising rates – which appear to have finally slowed down – coupled with staff absences “mean that we’re not going as fast as we would like on backlog recovery”.
With over half of ‘Covid’ admissions currently being incidental admissions, i.e., patients being treated primarily for other conditions, the question is why these hospitals can’t cope with slightly higher numbers of patients than normal. The number of Covid patients in mechanical ventilation beds is way down on the second half of 2021. So it doesn’t appear to be COVID-19 that is causing the problems.
So what’s going on? Are too many staff staying at home with a runny nose?
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
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Just for interest I price checked a private 15 minute GP consultation in London last week, it was £70. I’m glad I movec to Germany the health system here is far better. Unfortunately the disease of global health companies is spreading over here too. Wherever there is money to be made. Some medical staff were interviewed and they said where a private company had taken over GP services unnecessary treatments were being pushed when they were not needed.
People cannot see their GP.
They need help and diagnosis.
The only place left is A&E – always made worse because some cultures only go to A&E.
GPs have a lot to answer for.
If the NHS is that great why is it that no other country has a similar dysfunctional organisation?
The whole NHS obsesses about Covid. The staff are still testing and isolating unnecessary. They continue social distancing and other protocols that slow everything down. The most disgraceful example has been given by Allison Pearson who was contacted by a surgeon who was forced by management to abort a heart operation on a patient, who tested positive but wasn’t suffering severe symptoms. The patient’s risk of death from heart disease was thereby increased to 90%, although he was at no risk from Covid.
You’re not supposed to go to Accident & Emergency (clue in name) unless you are dying – it’s not an out of hours GP service as many think.
If the wonderful ‘OURNHS’ sacked the thousands of diversity managers, all friends and relatives of the political class enjoying mega-salaried sinecures, they could reduce national insurance contributions and still have more money to treat real health problems while forgetting trivialities like the common cold.
But Doris wants you dead, as well as your money.
“the 1.25% hike is ‘necessary’ to bail out the NHS ”
Why not tackle the many inefficiencies first?
Like sacking diversity managers.
Perhaps the NHS could divert some of the cash it spends on lobbyists to improving ICU capacity? This alarmist nonsense is all about politics and self-interest. It is deeply cynical. It is what comes from calling a chronically ineffective health service “precious” and in need of saving rather than being seen as the monstrous leviathan that it really is requiring urgent root and branch reform. Are you up for it Boris? I didn’t think so.
And how is one to know if one is ”dying”?
Perhaps doctors should start doing what they’re paid to do. This might relieve some pressure on the system.
GPs, that is.
My GP’s practice does not answer the phone – or allow you to make appointments via their online service anymore. It’s well nigh impossible to be seen, or even speak to a GP. And then they wonder why everyone ends up in A & E.
How about giving covid pts ivermectin that they can buy over the counter. At 6p a pill it would cost the average person £5 or less for Tx. And guess what, it works. Then the sad little a&e depts could look after “the dying”.
Doing away with ‘minor injuries clinics’ was a huge mistake – which we knew at the time. And also the amalgamation of A&Es. Anyone could see that chaos would be the end result – but, of course, perhaps that was the long term idea. Or is that too fanciful?
If the ambulance shortage in this country is really true, could it be because we have just supplied Ukraine with a whole lot of ambulances (see UK Column’s news for Wednesday)?
I have an appointment at a hospital in Buckinghamshire (High Wycombe as it happens) this morning and I am not looking forward to it.
I shall have my exemption card handy printed in Classical Greek.
‘Millions of patients were urged Wednesday not to go to A&E’
Come off it, Will. We don’t want this lazy American newspeak coming in here. This is England. ’On Wednesday, millions of patients were urged not to go to A&E.’. There. Feel better?
I do wish journalists would learn how to write in English and not that vulgar dialect called American. In other languages, by using different cases (ablative, dative, depending), this sort of usage is acceptable; we cannot do this in English and we need to use prepositions. Will (and others) take note.
I note that it was published in the Mail.
Last week, I was taken to an A&E dept at a large hospital in Wiltshire by someone (not an ambulance), and was seen quite quickly by someone, and I was only there for a couple of hours. Good service, as it happened. Plenty of other patients there, fairly busy by the look of it.
And for this 3rd world service we are paying £175b this year.
It’s a fine thing to contemplate isn’t it.
Basically if you have a heart attack or a stroke, you’re almost guaranteed to be dead before an ambulance gets to you even if you have all the alarm and alert tech that money can buy.
“asked the community to only call 999 in an emergency.”
Thought that was always the point of emergency services! What else would you call them for?
If the useless Health Secretary was to stir his stumps and prise the GPs from behind their sofas (where they’ve been counting all their money for the last two years) and insist that they start seeing people face-to-face or be sacked, the pressure on A&E departments would ease considerably.
Makes me want to go out and bang some pots!
Well, it is Thursday night!
Umbongo from the Congo says “Me doctor – you patient! Me know medicine!”
Sums the NHS up.
I’ve an idea.! 20 years ago we had 80,000 additional beds in the NHS, and we had staff to tend to the patients in them. What say we begin the process of rebalancing this, having more NHS employees who actually deal with patients and reduce the ones pointlessly pushing paper around, and begin to expand the medical capabilities of the NHS rather than its endless bureaucratic growth..? You care directly for patients. You directly support the people who care for patients. If you are three steps aways from patient care, then your job is probably not worth doing.
Beds have gone down but the number of doctors & nurses has gone up. It’s a mystery to me too.
Main thing we’d need to do is thin out the population. I wonder how many people have come to the UK since Blair flung open the borders.
At least 15 million.
Legally.
And 3 or 4 million illegals.
Is it my imagination or does that article completely fail to mention that the reason a lot of people are going to A&E is because it’s no longer possible to see a GP?
Or am I mistaken?
They’re called clinicians now. A catch-all nomenclature for anyone who can be bothered to speak to a patient at my surgery. Who knows if there is a real doctor there anymore.
I’ll reserve my pity and sorrow for anyone who refused to join in the clapping and tiktok dancing and donating money via Captain Tom to the NHS managers’ iPad renewal fund.
Most of the British public deserve this after their 2 years of spineless compliance, cries for more lockdowns, more money trees, more testing, more jibbetyjabs, more compulsion, more excommunication of the non-compliant.
If that herd is thinned out as a consequence then so be it.
I’m afraid the term ‘ACCIDENT and Emergency’ implies you should attend there for routine fractures that won’t kill you but will give you long-term handicaps if not set quickly.
If the NHS refuses to set broken bones, they should have their budgets cut accordingly. Setting fractures is one of the highest economic returns going, seeing as how walking normally is essential to most jobs.
Seriously, if you won’t treat broken ankles, legs, wrists and arms you should be sacked without compensation.
The ‘world beating’ NHS that is the ‘envy’ of the world!
But … but … but they said that the NHS was the envy of the world?
But, so far at least, no-one is bankrupted in this country in order to pay for their medical care.
Erm… they’ve just practically bankrupted the entire country to pay for ‘medical care’…
By the time the NHS admitted that at least a quarter of its so-called COVID patients where people repeat-tested in hospital until a test returned a positive result, I strongly suspected that this number was way to low and that the real number of these was probably rather around 3/4s. As they’re now admitting that half of there so-called COVID patients are …, one can safely assume that this really means all. Hence, the NHS is self-cripping by trying to put as many patients as possible on COVID wards. Considering that these are likely almost all people who tested positive in hospital, most of them probably after having already been there for a while, the complete hospital COVID circus can be scrapped: If it was effective, noncosomical infections wouldn’t happen.
Suggested solution: Get rid of NHS managers whose hobby horse happens to be COVID wards. They’re probably dead weight, anyway.
Off-topic but very important: the German parliament has this afternoon voted by 378 votes to 296 AGAINST making “vaccination” against “Covid” COMPULSORY for people aged 60+.
I do not know whether there is a “recall” procedure in Germany, but if there is then USE IT. Those who voted in favour are not fit to hold public office.
This bill should never have been allowed to come before the Bundestag.
I believe in human rights. “My body is my own” is a human right.
What other stinking bills will be allowed next? Slaughtering the disabled?
Compulsory euthanasia, I expect.
Didn’t ever exist. Just a policy of killing people permanently hospitalized with crippling diseases (or what was considered a crippling disease at that time) provided the majority of a group of medical experts selected for this purpose came to the conclusion that there was no realistic hope of the patient ever recovering.
That’s not really that much different from the NHS stopping or never providing life-saving treatment when that’s not considered cost effective. A recent story (I remember) was that of a teenage boy with dysfunctional kidney who had been kept alive by periodic hospital care who was ultimatively told that he should now please bugger of and die as he was too much a drain on NHS resources.
That’s not how the German system works. While the whole of it is byzantinely complicated, the core is relatively simple: Party committees compile lists of candidates for parliament ordered from most-preferred to least-preferred. Voters select a party list. Provided a party got at least 5% of the vote, people from its party list will be allocated to parliamentary seats by a method which approximates getting as many candidates from every party into a seat that the outcome matches the percentage of the vote each party got (so-called proportional representation).
Consequently, voters have no influence on selecting the people who’ll end up in parliament.
NB: This is a serious oversimplification but accurate enough (in my opinion).
I understand the party lists. Theoretically there could be a recall system too, but OK, there isn’t one.
How did support for and opposition to this bill break down by party?
There isn’t and couldn’t: Members of parliament are expressively permitted to vote as it pleases them on any issue, at least insofar voters’ opinions are concerned. Party/ faction leaders’ opinions are a different issue.
I thought each voter had two votes one used in the manner you describe
but their first vote is done on a “first past the post basis”.
The info for Austria is out of date. Austria suspended compulsory vaccination earlier this month, six days before fines for non-compliance were due to start being imposed.
Only Suspended… and the “people” who advocated compulsion in medical treatment are still strangely disconnected from a tree via a rope.
And meanwhile, are over 70s still being forced to have jabs in Greece? Or did they have to give that up? Haven’t seen anything about it lately.
Think that Dellingpod went to Costa Rica. He said they were quite laid back. Maybe there it is just in hospitals?
It’s amusing that it’s mandatory in The Vatican given the use of aborted foetus tissue in the development of the vaccine.
Stay Home, Save Lives, Protect the NHS
More proof of the cognitive dissonance embedded in this nonsense statement. Through our ‘protection’ we have effectively euthanized the NHS.
We were told how crazy and bigoted we were for daring to mention this…
“NHS” = “No Help for the Sick”.
Notional Health System
National Health Satire