Top doctor slams patients who treat A&E like shopping
‘Unrealistic expectations’ on waiting times
A LEADING consultant says patients can no longer expect to be seen within four hours at A&E and should just ‘deal with’ NHS failures.
Professor David Oliver, clinical vice president of the Royal College of Physicians, says patients have ‘consumerist’ expectations of the health service.
The consultant said hospitals simply could not provide the care they used to and officials should be more honest.
It came, he said, as A&E units in England dealt with ‘ a record number of attendances’ last Monday due to the cold weather.
Speaking at the Future of Ageing conference in London, Professor Oliver said patients should be given honest information, adding: ‘You will be on a trolley in A&E for more than four hours, quite likely, you will have to leave hospital when you don’t feel ready to go because someone else’s mum or dad needs to come into the bed you have vacated.
‘You won’t be able to stay on the intensive care unit as long as you would like to and staff will be rushed off their feet and you will have to sometimes wait for an operation.’
Professor Oliver, a consultant in geriatrics and general internal medicine at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, added: ‘Just like we have a mismatch between the cost of the activity and the funding, we have got a growing mismatch between increasingly consumerist public expectations and what the service can realistically offer.
There are certain things we can no longer do, we can’t do them as quickly as we did before, and you’re going to have to deal with that or you will have to pay more through general taxation.’ It comes after it was revealed yesterday that NHS England officials had drafted plans requiring GPs to ration cough medicines, migraine pills and heartburn remedies.
Executives are looking to save hundreds of millions of pounds after receiving a third of the NHS funding requested from Chancellor Philip Hammond – who allocated an extra £2.8billion in the Budget.
The pressure on the health service has already led NHS England to warn there may be a ‘tough winter’ ahead, after missing the target to see 95 per cent of A&E patients within four hours in every month since July 2015.
Last month it emerged that patients were waiting more than two years for routine operations, despite health service rules saying they should be treated within 18 weeks.
Writing in the British Medical Journal last year, Professor Oliver said the unhappiness of many patients and their families ‘stems from expectations we can’t reliably meet and should perhaps stop promising’.
Rachel Power, chief executive of the Patients Association, said: ‘David Oliver’s comments paint a bleak but incisive picture of how the NHS is increasingly being obliged to operate due to the Government’s decisions about the funding.’
‘He is right to highlight that patients should currently expect a falling standard of care. Avoiding this by funding the NHS adequately will require a greater share of our GDP to be allocated to it, and therefore the Government (and possibly some sections of the public) need to re-think their attitude towards tax rises.’
At the Future of Ageing Conference on Wednesday, Professor Oliver said A&E attendances had reached a record high in some areas even before December.
Speaking after the conference, he said: ‘ We need to have a much more honest conversation with the public about what the NHS can deliver.
‘There is no magic solution – we need a better funding settlement for the NHS, and we need to support our workforce to deliver the excellent patient care they are capable of providing.’