The General Infirmary...
Tuesday
ACCORDING to official government figures, no-one should wait longer than 4 hours to be seen at their local A&E. But in truth, most busy casualty departments struggle to meet these targets. It’s time to see how bad the situation really is.
Disguising myself as a hospital porter, I stroll into the casualty department of a busy hospital where an electronic sign optimistically announces: “Current Waiting Time: 45mins.”
An elderly lady with a suspected fractured hip after a fall sits in a wheelchair. The pain is clearly etched into the lines on her careworn old face. I know exactly what she is thinking: “I have paid National Insurance contributions all my life without fail. Now that I need the health service to come to my aid, I just pray that it won’t let me down.”
Falling for my disguise, a nurse approaches and asks me to take the patient to X-ray, where she has an immediate appointment.
I wheel the old lady past the X-ray department and through a labyrinth of seemingly endless corridors to a remote part of the hospital where I park her up and apply the footbrake. As I wedge open an external firedoor and make my way to a safe vantage point, an icy wind blows in, cutting through the poor woman’s flimsy hospital gown. She shivers as she sits waiting for the best part of twenty minutes until a hospital orderly finally shows up.
Filled with mock concern, he closes the door and rushes to fetch a blanket, asking the old lady where she needs to be. I see my chance and step forward. Once again, my porter disguise fools the hapless medic and I am asked to take the woman straight to the Radiography department. This time I wheel the poor woman, who is now in considerable pain, out the rear entrance and round to the back of the kitchen block, where I park her behind a line of industrial food waste dumpsters.
It’s starting to rain now, so I make my way to the warmth of the boiler house to watch what happens next. And what happens next is truly
shocking. For three hours, not a single member of the hospital’s 600-strong staff comes to check on the old lady. Doctors, nurses, surgeons and consultants all come and go in the car park, too grand to come over and see if there are any patients hidden behind the bins who need help.
Indeed, it is not until a lowly paid kitchen porter comes out for his afternoon fag break and hears the old lady’s pitiful cries that the alarm is raised. By the time she finally gets a bed in the Intensive Care Unit, where she is treated for her broken hip and hypothermia, our long-suffering OAP has been waiting for more than 6 hours... a full two hours longer than the official government guidelines. She’s been failed by the system that was set up to save her, and it’s a story of failure that is told thousands of times every day across our failing NHS.
The truth is, Britain’s hospitals are in terminal decline, and if something isn’t done to save them, they’ll soon be flatlining.