Patients faced 13-hour A&E wait at Jubilee
THIRTEEN-HOUR Accident & Emergency waits following the closure of GP practices during the jubilee weekend show a “completely unacceptable” face of the NHS, patients groups say.
Video footage of a nurse warning patients on Monday that they may not be seen until the next day prompted warnings from medics that it was an “all too familiar picture” across the NHS.
The video, which has had more than 1.3 million views, shows an Essex hospital overloaded with patients, following the four-day bank holiday weekend, when routine GP services were closed.
Yesterday Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, said the situation was “not what anyone wants to see”.
NHS figures show a record 24,000 people a month facing waits of at least 12 hours in A&E – up from 694 the year before.
Medics said that hospitals faced extra pressure over the four-day holiday, with routine GP services closed and more hospital staff on leave.
In the footage from Monday night, the nurse addresses crowds in Harlow A&E, run by Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS trust in Essex, saying: “I estimate by the time I go home in the morning at 8 o’clock, some of you will still be here waiting for a doctor because the waits will get up to 12 or 13 hours.”
Dennis Reed, director at Silver Voices, a campaign group for over-60s, said the situation was “completely unacceptable in the 21st century”.
He said: “There is a lack of access to GPS, so A&ES are taking people who really need a doctor but can’t get one, which is resulting in A&ES being completely overloaded.”
The national GP survey last year found that quarter of those who tried to book a GP appointment but found their practice closed ended up in A&E, if they chose to contact another NHS service.
Stephanie Lawton, of the Princess Alexandra Hospital trust, said: “The public can help us to ease pressures by using the NHS 111 service for advice in non-urgent cases. As ever, please continue to call 999 or attend the emergency department for emergencies.”
The NHS is a mess. The pandemic has exacerbated diagnostic delays and led to a backlog of treatments that will take years to clear. So many things need to change that a major report into the health service would normally be welcome.
Yet an independent review published yesterday addresses none of the issues that affect the great majority of people, or at least not directly. The report into leadership in health and adult social care, led by Gen Sir Gordon Messenger and Dame Linda Pollard, makes a series of recommendations intended to improve management.
It found a lack of consistency and co-ordination in the way that managers are trained and developed, while pointing to “poor behaviours and attitudes such as discrimination, bullying and blame cultures”. At the same time, however, Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, said “diversity and inclusion” jobs in the NHS needed to be cut.
These two positions seem contradictory. Top managers need to be recruited on the basis of their abilities to run a health trust not because they conform to “woke” standards.
While the review addresses an important internal matter to do with NHS governance, it seems far removed from the day-to-day experience most people have of the health service.
In the Commons yesterday, Boris Johnson extolled the levels of investment in recruitment of doctors, nurses and in hospitals and yet this seems to be having little impact on the front-line service, certainly in primary care. The only measure of whether NHS reforms are worthwhile is how much they improve patient care. It is by no means clear how these changes will do so.