NHS is broken - also, did my Pa have a stroke?
Strap in folks, this is a fun one.
Yesterday at around midday my almost 75 yr old Pa started feeling extremely fatigued, weak all over, hot and, in his words, very odd.
He rang my sister who lives 5 minutes away, she got there and immediately called an ambulance. They were there in sub 10 minutes and checked him over. He couldn't even walk in a straight line. They took his blood pressure and it benched 199/98. They said he had a possible stroke and needed to go to A&E (ER for my US friends). Not living more than 10 minutes from the local Medway Hospital (major hospital) they went there. It took 3 hours to get to being triaged. The time was 4:30pm when they're told that the closest Stroke clinic is Maidstone hospital, 40 minutes away at rush hour.
On the way out, they saw the paramedics that had been out to respond and they called ahead to Maidstone Hospital so he was on record. That did nothing. When he got there, it took another 2 hours for them to do another triage, then another 2 to do blood work. Then the stroke unit refused to take him stating that they didn't think it was a stroke. After politely arguing the case my sister had to remind them to do his blood pressure again. At this point it had come down a little. He is still really weak and couldn't hold a cuppa without spilling it.
Eventually they relented and did a CT scan. When they checked the results they said it wasn't a major stroke but could have been a posterial stroke which wouldn't show. They couldn't do anything else there and should go back to Medway. At this point it's midnight. At 1am, my sister is checking my dad back into Medway A&E. 1.5hrs later they're through reception and sitting in waiting room 3 with 29 other people. I headed down at 5am to relieve my sister. Between 5am and 11am they took his blood pressure twice and we waited in the waiting area with everyone, my usually fit and healthy dad in a wheelchair. He's exhausted, had no sleep and was genuinely scared, which he never is.
It took until 2pm to see a doctor and we had to put in an official complaint to the nurses liaison team about the handling to even get that far. An hour later and then he saw a consultant who gave him a thorough check.
Concerned, the doctor said he wants an MRI scan performed, but to do this he was being made an outpatient and sent home. He would get an appointment and come back in the next few days. Why? Because if they admitted him he would join the inpatient side and they have 1 MRI scanner. He may not have been seen for up to 2 weeks and would simply be taking up a bed. As an outpatient the team has 3 MRI scanners and he will be seen quicker, plus less likely to pick up an infection from the hospital. It took another hour and a half after this, plus chasing the team to get them to take bloods and remove his cannula so he could go home.
Sorry for the long read, but how backward and broken is this system?
They still don't know if it was a stroke or a brain degenerative issue, all we know is he is home, cannot look after himself or my disabled mother and the whole situation sucks.
Man, I'm so sorry you guys are going through all this. Not just the medical emerrency, but all the hoops and herding of staff to do their jobs as well. I know you must be so, so stressed and worried about what's going on.
Unfortunately, I don't know what happened any better than you do. But I sincerely hope you and your family get through this.
I appreciate that. I'm just frustrated with the medical teams and how backwards everything seems.
From the paramedics saying to go to one hospital with suspected stroke to find out that they are even prepared for stroke patients and always transfer them after diagnosis, to the lack of available doctors to see everyone.
Many will chime in "Oh. That's a Tory government causing this!" but it really feels like a management and workflow issue. A simple workflow assigned to each patient with treatment and timing path would really free up nurses who seem to be bumbling along and missing basic things.
The NHS are great and very overworked/under paid but it just looks very unprofessional too.
You can add my sympathies for such a horrible experience. I really hope you get more clarity and treatment for your dad quickly.
I also had to go to NHS A&E and various hospital visits this year, and some of my impressions are similar to yours. Staff usually compassionate and helpful but management systems full of inefficiencies. The system has not let me down nearly as badly as it did your family, but I see a lot oddities.
I feel like perhaps too long operating in crisis-mode and fighting for resources, has led to an inflexible culture where it is hard to rework how things operate.
From what I've read about this - and I'm not from the UK but from a different country which might be heading this way in the next 10-15 years, which is where my interest came from - the main issue is aging population gradually but rather significantly increasing the strain on the healthcare system, and literally every government just ignoring this main issue and kicking it down to the next one until it was too late to do anything.
There was enough time to do something, but nobody did, and now it's going to be bad for some time before it gets better because the problem with aging population is very likely going to keep getting worse over the next decade or two. I'm sure there are gaps in efficiency, but there is no way they will be enough to solve it.
I see some hope in interventions focused on reducing parts of the workload that are not spend on patients, like using AI to record speech to text and use it to do paperwork (there's an article linked on Tildes about it right now, it seems to be working well so far), or just hiring more non-medical assistants. But I don't know of any other quick solution.
That is such a terrible and scary situation. I really, really hope he recovers and gets whatever treatment he needs. I am so sorry.
This is not nearly as extreme, but when I was still living in the US, my boyfriend visited from Australia to see me and to look for a job that would offer him a work visa (which was necessary to enable us to live together for enough time that I could qualify for a more permanent visa to Australia). The morning of his last day, he developed stomach pains so bad that he vomited. We got the runaround from assorted medical establishments that refused to look at him because, as they put it, it could be a appendicitis and they don't do appendicitis.
It was close to midnight before we finally managed to get help for him. It turns out it was just a small kidney stone and all he needed was a strong painkiller until it passed. The bill was several thousand dollars, and it took over a year — and many stressful tears on our part — for his travel insurance to pay it. That is largely because the collection agency refused to send mail or make phone calls overseas, so instead they were fiercely harassing me and my family (we'd had to put down my address on the form at the ER because they would not accept an overseas address), and then I had to forward their communications to him so that he could then forward them to the travel insurance company.
In the meantime, he did not dare travel back to the US while the collection agency was on the warpath, and I couldn't travel to Australia because my job did not offer any vacation days. And so we did not see each other for over a year, all because of a minor kidney stone.
I don't know what you are talking about. The NHS is the greatest national health care in the whole world.
Sarcasm aside, the situation is like this already since some years and the farthest you go from big cities, the exponentially worse it gets.
Problem is, there isn't really any meaningful talk about it in the media and there is a clear push to have it get worse so that at some point the motion to incentivize private healthcare actors will be well received.
Can't wait to see how deep this country can bury itself before, if even, something, anything, happens that will make the "lords" start pissing themselves and start considering that maybe they took it a step too far.
That sounds extraordinarily frustrating. Had a similar experience here with my SO's mom here in the US. She had severe abdominal pain and they passed her around from facility to facility, giving her different painkillers and like, antiacid medications. Weeks passed and nothing was working, they thought that maybe it would get better on it's own, so they finally did an exploratory surgery and found out that most of her GI tract had been starved of blood flow due to a clot and had been damaged beyond repair. Frustrating but at least they found it, and she underwent some pretty extreme surgery.
While she was recovering, she started experiencing stroke-like symptoms, some muscle weakness on one side of her body, some slurred speech, and it took days for a stroke specialist to see her to evaluate if it could be one. Then it took days of them checking in for a few minutes each day to see how she was doing. In that time, it got way worse and culminated in, I don't know, a big stroke, she was basically non-responsive for months.
I've never been so disappointed in a medical system. I know it's absurdly expensive here in the US, but I at least thought that the staff were competent and well trained. The entire time, doctors and nurses dragged their feet getting prescriptions, diagnosing issues, and sharing information. That was the worst part, different doctors would stop in, learn info about her case, and then not pass that info to the nurses or other doctors. "oh she has muscle weakness in her arm? I'll just not write that down and promptly forget"
rant over, your frustrations reminded me of the frustrations I experienced here. The hoops that you have to jump through for what should be a straightforward and basically automated process. Healthcare is complicated, sure, but while healthcare professionals excel at medical and technical knowledge, logistical and communication knowledge is severely lacking, to the detriment of both of our medical systems.
I'm sorry for all the hurdles and pain you're all going through, I hope he gets on the path to recovery soon.
Sadly, a lot of times it's a lottery with healthcare. I'm very glad that my family has been lucky on multiple occasions with my home country's healthcare system (which is also socialised) and I am thankful for the NHS, who promptly diagnosed and planned out treatment for a cancer that was detected after I went in for nothing more than what felt like a chest infection.
But your experience shows that we need an overhaul of our medical system, it's not fair to have to go through what is frankly a stressful, traumatic experience because we're not able to retain staff or provide a "simplified" line of bureaucracy.
You're right in your comment about this being a workflow issue (I too had to go after nurses to be sent home, dragging an infusion pump along the way) and the NHS' problems couldn't be solved with all the money in the world if we don't solve these workflow issues.
That being said, I hope you and your family get through this as soon as possible, and that the NHS remains free and accessible in the future, so we can tackle these issues head on.