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Patients 'dying in hospital corridors' 
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Patients are dying in hospital corridors as safety is compromised by "intolerable" conditions, doctors say.

The warning has been made in a letter to the prime minister signed by 68 senior A&E doctors spelling out the danger patients are facing this winter.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42572116

The Tories won’t care. We’ve seen the apologies, and the half-arsed shrugs recently.

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Thu Jan 11, 2018 12:43 pm
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Every winter, there's a "crisis" - more people are poorly, more are like to need urgent input and attend A&E, more are likely to die or deteriorate. Predictable, but nobody really does anything to help.

NHS funding goes down, fewer beds (300,000 in the 1980s, 129,000 in 2016), more people, and fewer staff (leaving due to demoralisation, rubbish pay etc) is a combination that's never going to succeed.

I remember working in A&E around 2009/10. The cublcles were full, patients were in trolleys in corridors. I had to wheel a trolley into a single room, do an assessment and management plan, and then wheel the patient back out into the corridor. Compound this with people coming in with stupid things like a sore throat for half a day, but they decided to wait in A&E to be seen rather than go to the GP or walk-in centre.

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Thu Jan 11, 2018 2:10 pm
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after care (convalescence) homes are no more the hospital beds cant be vacated. stop/cancel one avenue then all other routes get blocked.

all Govt's have been doing this for years. thats why i believe that the NHS should be taken out of any Govt. control ...

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Fri Jan 12, 2018 4:09 am
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MrStevenRogers wrote:
after care (convalescence) homes are no more the hospital beds cant be vacated. stop/cancel one avenue then all other routes get blocked.

all Govt's have been doing this for years. thats why i believe that the NHS should be taken out of any Govt. control ...

Agree that cottage hospitals and step-down units were shut to save money. In which case, that leaves patients waiting to recover in "limbo" whilst their care packages are sorted out. Historically, patients that were medically fit but not quite ready to go home would go to a step-down unit where they would remain until fit to go home. That freed up more beds in hospitals.

Additionally agree about the NHS being taken out of the Govt's hands - it's constantly used as a political football and to score points.

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Fri Jan 12, 2018 8:17 am
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cloaked_wolf wrote:
Every winter, there's a "crisis" - more people are poorly, more are like to need urgent input and attend A&E, more are likely to die or deteriorate. Predictable, but nobody really does anything to help.

NHS funding goes down, fewer beds (300,000 in the 1980s, 129,000 in 2016), more people, and fewer staff (leaving due to demoralisation, rubbish pay etc) is a combination that's never going to succeed.

I remember working in A&E around 2009/10. The cublcles were full, patients were in trolleys in corridors. I had to wheel a trolley into a single room, do an assessment and management plan, and then wheel the patient back out into the corridor. Compound this with people coming in with stupid things like a sore throat for half a day, but they decided to wait in A&E to be seen rather than go to the GP or walk-in centre.


Getting an appointment with a GP here can be a real challenge. Phone lines open at 8am, by the time you get through all appointments are gone. Yes, you could dial 111, but they don’t issue prescriptions, and I don’t see how you can easily examine a patient over the phone, especially if they have a sopre throat and may find speaking hard (and how would a phone call allow the GP to actually SEE the throat to determine the correct course of action anyway?).

There are no walk-in places in Chelmsford. The only one we had, which was in Sainsbury’s (look on Google maps to see where that is) closed a couple of years ago.

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Fri Jan 12, 2018 9:14 am
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paulzolo wrote:
Getting an appointment with a GP here can be a real challenge. Phone lines open at 8am, by the time you get through all appointments are gone. Yes, you could dial 111, but they don’t issue prescriptions, and I don’t see how you can easily examine a patient over the phone, especially if they have a sopre throat and may find speaking hard (and how would a phone call allow the GP to actually SEE the throat to determine the correct course of action anyway?).

There are no walk-in places in Chelmsford. The only one we had, which was in Sainsbury’s (look on Google maps to see where that is) closed a couple of years ago.

Walk-in centres were profitable, hence run. Some have stopped being profitable and hence shutting down.

Appointments are always limited - there's only a certain number in a day, even if a single GP worked 24 hrs a day non stop - you can only ever fit in a certain amount of work. More doctors would help but many practices are struggling financially to pay staff they currently have, let alone hire new staff. Some practices shut down which means the patients are allocated with nearby practices, putting extra pressure on them - no real increase in funding or resources to deal with the extra patients or generated workload. It becomes a domino effect.

I work in a semi-rural place that's had very little population change and no "immigrants". Demand for appointments has gone up 50% over the past five or six years. Mondays are our busiest days. The remainder of the week, there can be empty slots that haven't been booked by the end of the day. Currently there are 11 empty slots for today. The downside of this is that sometimes patients come in with trivia because it's easy to get an appointment. I had a patient who came in yesterday because he went to the pharmacist and ask about a particular brand of emollients. The pharmacist didn't want to enter a discussion because the patient had a history of skin problems (itchy skin because it's dry - emollients are perfect for this!). The patient sat down, told me what had happened, and I told him it was fine to use the brand he wanted. The whole took me less than two minutes but that was a 10-minute slot that was taken up needlessly.

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Fri Jan 12, 2018 11:06 am
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