2 hour wait for an ambulance

[Johnnythefox]

I believe that the NHS requires a lot more money, and so does Education and the Police and defence and local councils, whose with me in demanding that we all pay more tax to fund these thing?

[M.C]

[stevo as b4]

How can we fix all of this though instead of saying "Oh well it's an impossible myriad of issues"?

The cap on Immigration, minimum £30k wage to qualify for permanent UK immigration, and a 12month UK resident limit to lower paid migrant workers, with a 12month ban from re-entering the country after that could and should help the immigration issue.

But what about:

1, oldies living longer but with numerous and complicated on going health issues? Maybe we look after them for the next decade and the olds will die out or reduce in numbers as the baby boomer generation expire?

2, The thick stupid and worthless piece of shit scummy people taking up too much ambulance and hospital time. Well maybe they should charge people £1000 if they make ambulance calls and receive treatment more than twice for non life threatening conditions.

3, Then there's the year on year increase in mentals and lonely or mentally vulnerable people, that we are expected to treat and look after and tie up resources looking after. There's no real fix for many mentals, or suicidal or unstable people, and there's not enough institutions to lock em up in, but it's OK for us to spend millions and tie up resources looking after them all, and some of these people will have an almost life long dependence on the health service.

4, I'm surprised that Tierbirdy hasn't mentioned the morbidly obese and the smokers, or the stupid pricks on construction sites doing stuff like cutting hazardous materials with no dust masks on, or climbing scaffolding towers with no harness or not wearing safety helmets etc.

The flip side to all that though is that if we don't look after our health and many more Brits die of these issues, then as long as the birth rate stays low then one day the hospitals and ambulance staff will have far fewer people to treat, but then fewer patients will mean less funding and more redundancy leading to more benefits being paid out to the masses out of work.

There ain't a fix to any of this really is there?

[Ste]

All of those four points cover things that other agencies should be dealing with.

1. Social care is how they should be looked after rather than having to be admitted to hospital and then getting stuck in a bed blocking situation. Baby boomer old people will die out and will be replaced by generation X who'll theoretically live even longer but there's about another fifteen to twenty years until generation X will start being old and frail.

2. You can charge people as much as much as you want but you won't see a penny of it if those people simply don't have the money. The people calling 999 unnecessarily such as the examples Tierbirdy describes. The mass public education program he suggests could make a difference but fixing peoples sense of entitlement is harder than teaching Joe Public what ambulances should and shouldn't be called for and what A&E is for and where you can get help for all the things that it's not for.

3. If community mental health services have the appropriate funding and staffing then that would lessen how much of a strain their service users / customers put on the NHS. When those people come into contact with ambulances or a&e then there's more than likely multiple missed opportunities where the community mental health services could be intervened but for whatever reason(s) they didn't. I don't have any statistics to back this up but I'm willing to be the majority of mental health people ambulances and a&e see are already known to the mental health services.

4. Don't forget those idiots who choose to ride dangerous motorcycles when there are safer modes of transport available.

There is a fix but it's not simple and most of it comes down to agencies and services who aren't the NHS. And educating the public. Calling an ambulance or going to A&E should be a last resort, for most situations there are better alternatives. Once that's drummed into people there'd be less strain on hospitals.

Ste for PM.

[Sister Sledge]

^^ This.
I'll also add: There were support places in erm.. place for vulnerable and disruptive people but almost everything was closed down. A great example is mental hospitals. Look at all of those places which had residency - almost all shut. Those long term residents were placed into communities and with little support. Nowadays that support has almost vanished.
People didn't stop being born with mental health issues. The load on the system is still there. With the massive cuts to services such as social working then those with problems are passed on to the next available slot. That could be police and ultimately hospitals.

I'll also add the reduction is 'special schools'. They were commonplace but now quite rare. Teachers with their huge class numbers are expected to deal with those children needing extra care. Not only does it put teachers off going to work (extra work) but it also disrupts mainstream pupils and affects their educations.

Don't even get me started on the entitled folk. F*cks sake some people are incredibly selfish.
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CCM 404 DS

[UnknownStuntm...]

[Ste]

There was a breakdown in communications somewhere along the lines and that's got fuck all to do with politics.

Anyway, it's feedback as much as it's a complaint.

Stuntman might be wasting his time and their time by providing feedback but the only thing he can be one hundred percent sure of is that if he doesn't give them that feedback then there's no chance at all of anything ever changing.

You'd think that paramedics / ambulance people like Tierbirdy would want as much feedback to be provided about situations where that's been a breakdown in communication as presumably, it's useful for them to know as much as possible before they get to the scene.

Everyone is on the same side.

[-]

[UnknownStuntm...]

Update:

So, Gwen has a busted hip.

After filling in the online complaint form, I got a call today from someone. Very well scripted response. Extremely well scripted and practised to be honest. Like they had spent a shitload of money mitigating this very thing.

So after consideration of points raised in this thread, at my earliest opportunity I made it very clear I don't want to waste anyone's time that could be spent fixing people. And that my comments about the wait time and not passing the key information on from the first responder to the crew are 'feedback', and that I don't need an investigation, internal or otherwise.

Still, the lady on the phone told me how seriously they take these incidents and an internal investigation would follow but as requested I would not get a notification of the outcome by email.

Then a few moments later I received an email documenting that conversation.

I find it ironic that there are all these systems in place to ensure I did not experience anxiety or distrust while using the service.

[Ste]

I'm guessing the call was from PALS?

[Sister Sledge]

I used PALS once and it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Must be other ways to ensure that complaints are dealt with higher up and don't bounce off a well scripted barrier?
Not NHS related but I have found myself actually contacting real managers about issues and they'd not even had word of my complaint due to those barriers in place - a good example was my son being bullied at school. Teachers were protecting themselves and not dealing with the bullying. I contacted the head teacher directly and all hell broke loose.

Gutted she's hurt. She's one of those very people we should respect so much. They sacrificed a lot to bring this country back to decent standards and now the same country is letting them down.
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CCM 404 DS

[Ste]

PALS are fucking useless.

[UnknownStuntm...]

[Ste]

Ah, basically the same thing even though they are just additional unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.

[Freddyfruitba...]

Totally agree that this is about a lack of communication and not politics or funding.

[Tierbirdy]

[Freddyfruitba...]

[Tierbirdy]

Yes it would make a difference. So the triaging categories go as follow:

Cat 1 - critical response, usually reserved for cardiac arrests and other things that will kill you quickly. Response time target is 8 minutes.

Cat 2 - immediately life threatening, here's where you get all your "unconscious" drunks, "difficulty in breathing" etc. Response time 14 minutes. This is where any public faller comes in, you don't have a choice in the system. If an elderly faller outdoors or in a public place it's a cat 2 response regardless of injuries or not.

Cat 3 - emergency response, generally here's where your elderly fallers go when they're in their own home and possibly injured. Response time is 30 minutes.

Cat 4 - non emergency response. Will not get lights and sirens. Response time 1 hour. These are usually when the GP has been to visit and thinks they need to go to hospital but won't die soon. This is also usually where non-injured elderly fallers in their own home come. Where all they need is someone to pick them up.

Cat 5 - non emergency response, response time 4 hours. Usually patient transport pre-booked stuff. Doris to the bunion clinic etc.


So if the call handler correctly heard and logged that Gwen had fallen outside, she would be a cat 2 response. If they'd thought she was inside and uninjured, a cat 4. Cat 3 if they're unsure.

However this doesnt mean a crew will see "oh sweet it's a cat 3, we can wait 10 mins before we have to leave the station, let me finish my cuppa" the level of triage doesn't matter if there's no ambulance to send.

The majority of calls are automatically dispatched by computer to the nearest available ambulance. Which could be 15 miles away. Then it gets 2 miles away and gets diverted to a higher priority call. So it auto dispatches another ambulance which is 8 miles away, which then gets diverted to another call. When a job is dispatched to us we are allowed 5 seconds to accept the job and 30 to start moving. We don't sit around waiting for someone to send us on a call, there is ALWAYS a call waiting for us. Generally once we leave the ambulance station in the morning we don't see it again until end of shift, 12+ hours of being run ragged job to job.

[UnknownStuntm...]

[kawakid]

[Irezumi aka Reuben]

First off, glad that the lady eventually got seen and I think it was correct you reported the speed of the service provided. Hopefully that works it's way back to someone who can then make a positive change to how things work.

The bit that I find interesting with all these conversations that happen around the NHS is that within the six values of the NHS is that "everyone counts". The interesting part is that everybody wants to apportion blame, not even cause it seems, what happened to every person being important regardless?

As an aside after having worked in the medical industry these problems are not unique to the NHS. I know of American's who repeat the same stories as over here in regards to healthcare, and in Holland as well, I am sure you can go places and find similar worldwide.

Regards the immigrant 'issue' does anyone have figures for the amount of people who pay taxes compared to those who don't? Or perhaps the percentage of NHS staff who are immigrants?
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Pictorgraphicalfantastical

[stevo as b4]

I get your point completely, and I'm in favour of really squeezing migration applicants to strict entry criteria and for only roles, and skills that we are in real shortage of in the UK such as health care, and education.

But step aside from London, and I wonder if a minimum £45k wage for immigrants coming into jobs here would create a conflict in society from all the UK born workers who earn the average UK wage or less.

It would be like an elitist of the foreign settlers and would that create animosity from UK workers or an underclass of native people in a country that all the money is earned by foreign nationals.

Of course I could be talking complete bollocks, but having all the money being earned by immigrants well it might create some very strong resentment.

Im not saying that UK workers are perfect, and I do get that there are jobs we don't like or want to do, and we won't be all that flexible with our working hours or holiday/benefits like eastern Europeans are. But this mostly applies to lower paid and fairly unskilled work.

[Jayy]

I would be going mad if that were someone I knew or same happened to me. Is complaining going to help? Probably not.


Friend of mine hit a roundabout raised curb at considerable speed and flew the best part of about 70ft and landed at the bottom of a hill.

He was there for about 1hr 45mins because "it wasn't serious", even though he couldn't move, was fucked in pain but fully conscious / no obvious signs of external bleeding, etc.

I get it, a serious emergency may be a pile up where people are trapped in cars, blood everywhere, that type of thing but it wasn't like he just fell off his skateboard. The bike was in 2 pieces and nobody had any idea of possible internal injuries, which as somebody who knows absolutely fuck all like myself, I would have thought internal injuries, based on how fast he was going, how far he went and him complaining of serious pain in lower back / abdomen area... would be highly likely to be internal?

Anyway... he was fine, he was actually completely fine, nothing broken, no internal injuries... quite how he got away with that is beyond me.

[temeluchus]

I'm willing to bed the largest drain on the NHS is elderly women.
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Some shite cruiser. Now with guns and FREEDOM!

[Sister Sledge]