Wigan A&E

I have just got back from A&E and its like a war zone and a total mess. Yvonne was rushed into the hospital about 3-30 this afternoon and I followed in the car. She was put in a side room on a trolley which was set up for two trolleys but there where four trolleys in it,You could not move for ambulance crews (at least 10 crews) who were waiting to discharge their patients to the nursing staff. I was told by the crew who were seeing to Yvonne that they did not think they would get away from the hospital before their shift ended at 7-00pm. At 6-30 Yvonne was handed over to another crew and again at 8-15 handed over to a third crew. At 8-30 she was seen by a nurse followed by a doctor. At 9-00pm she was moved onto a corridor and it would not surprise me if she is still on a corridor when I go up to the hospital tomorrow. I did not want her to go to the hospital but our Family doctor said she could not be treated at home and insisted she went to the hospital

Unfortunately Peter that's Tory Britain

Hope everything goes well with Yvonne, Peter.

Thinking about you both Peter,and hope everything turns out okay.x

Sadly this is a result of this week's junior doctors' strike. I hope your wife is OK Peter.

Angelwood This is the second time this year Yvonne has been admitted to the hospital. She was 1st admitted in August and it was bad then, she was on a trolley in a corridor from being admitted at 2-00 pm on Mon till getting a bed at 7-30pm on a Tues. Yesterday there was a lot of internal upheaval and the nursing staff god bless them were not happy with the constraints placed on them by I gleaned was by a person in a ivory tower who had no medical experience. I over heard a couple of nurses threatening to go home because of the constraints they were being asked to work under. There had been a meeting and the triage nurses were only allowed to do certain things and the ambulance crews also could only do certain things An ambulance woman was walking around with a clip board trying to co-ordinate with the ambulance crews and the triage nurses has to when patients got seen tooI could have bee mistaken but the triage area was closed down for nearly two hours and the waiting time in A&E walk in area was 12 hours. Whilst we were waiting an ambulance crew from SHEFFIELD brought a patient in from a WIgan area nursing home .God help any one who needed an ambulance in a hurry there were at least 10 ambulances parked up with the crews tied up in A&E when I left.

Handsomeminer and Timl while waiting in A&E they brought a gentleman in and I over heard him say he worked at Golborne Colliery for 15 years. His name was Les Arnold I did not get the chance to speak to him. I remember a Eric Arnold don't know if they were related to each other?

The system is definitely broken at Wigan A&E. I got a phone call at 5-50 am of a doctor from the hospital asking me WHY I HAD admitted Yvonne into hospital. She said she could not get any sense out of Yvonne.She was told Yvonne has Vascular Dementia and as short term memory loss and I had not admitted her to hospital. It was a GP from our surgery who had examined Yvonne and called for the rapid response ambulance plus the normal ambulance .I gave her a potted history over the phone then I printed off Yvonne's notes which I can access online and then took these up to the hospital and gave them to the nurse looking after Yvonne. I said if I can access Yvonne's medical notes the hospital should be able to do the same I did not get to see the Doctor because the nurse did not know where she was and did not know when she would be doing her rounds Maybe when i go up later I will have more luck

Best of luck peter,

Hope your wife is home with you soon Peterp.

PeterP

I hope Yvonne gets better soon, and it makes wonder if Leigh Casualty had still been open, along with the Billinge, Whelley, Astley, Atherleigh, and Firs hospitals, had they also have been kept open as they were 40yrs ago, there might have been more beds and medical facilities available, and Wigan A&E gets clobbered now, because Chorley A&E has been closed, it is just for minor injuries now like the Leigh 'walk in' centre is.

So they close all those hospital facilities down in places like Wigan Metro, and at the same time let in an extra 15 million people into the country and this is what happens.

UK population 1983 - 56.33 million.

UK population 2023 - 67.74 million

It's disgraceful Peter. For a profession that swears an oath to "do no harm", they need to start looking in the mirror.

I agree, Tommy.
Far, far too many people in this country, and not enough facilities to cater for them all. And it shows no signs of decreasing!
Who ever lets these immigrants in has a lot to answer for
I hope your wife is home soon, Peter.

So this would have nothing to do with the junior doctors 6 day strike?

The strike is just making an already terrible mess worse!

Peter terrible time for you really sad to read about. It seems like doctors have got to make a choice now like tts says cut back after cut back and closures last few years now its hit the fan these politicians start to blame the staff for being run off their feet. badly run hospitals managers getting super pay who don't care about people only themselves proved about the post office scandal this week

Interesting piece from today’s Telegraph.

Doctors

all created by a tory party that doesnt care .

Cant read the article gaffer, subscription needed

First Mate. I’ll post it later.

If you was walking down the street and someone collapsed , would you do your best to help them or would you negotiate payment first ?

I would help them and not want paying for it

G.B.

Hope everything is ok for Yvonne and you Peter P. She doesn't deserve this at all.

First Mate. The piece from today's Telegraph.

There is a way to make doctors’ pay competitive – but the BMA won’t like it
The NHS is one of the UK’s last socialist relics – there is no real market in healthcare

KATE ANDREWS
6 January 2024 • 6:00am

It’s not often that advocates for socialist systems rely on free market arguments to make their case. But times are tough over at the British Medical Association (BMA), where the junior doctor strikes are, for now, the outlier within the NHS.
There have been breakthroughs in pay negotiations for nurses and consultants, but the leaders behind the junior doctor strikes insist that the Government’s offer of roughly 12pc is not anywhere near close enough to the 35pc they are demanding.
Perhaps strike leaders have registered what many of us already know: that market-based approaches almost always lead to more prosperous outcomes.
To get that sky-high pay rise, they have to lean into the unfamiliar. But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that those who are trying to wedge more market-based arguments into the NHS pay debate misunderstand the fundamentals.
The argument goes that Britain must compete with other countries for doctors, or risk even more brain drain from the NHS. We’ve heard a great deal about medics fleeing our broken health service. The number of medics applying to work abroad hit a 10-year high last year, according to the General Medical Council.
Doctors emigrating has long been a problem for the NHS – not to mention taxpayers, who are estimated to cover 72pc of the £420,533 it costs on average to train a doctor to consultant level. But the dire state of the NHS has workers picking up the pace: the 8,625 who applied for a certificate to work abroad last year represented a 20pc increase on 2022.
The British Medical Journal reported in 2022 that four in ten doctors plan to leave Britain as soon as they are able to do so. Among that 40pc is the co-chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, who indicated just last week that he’d consider a move to Canada.
In an ideal world, Britain would be competing with other rich nations – not just to keep its own doctors in the UK, but to attract the best and the brightest medics from abroad.
But expecting the UK to do this is a bit like expecting a shopkeeper slapped with price controls to sell their products for more money. Where socialist rules dominate, markets struggle to function. And the NHS is one of the UK’s last socialist relics. There is no real market in healthcare.
This is a political choice. Politicians in every major party have spent decades insisting that the single-payer model not be touched. Organisations are vehement that reform stays off the table.
This means NHS workers often have very little choice over when, where and how they receive or provide healthcare. The system is deliberately designed that way. Britain has one of the most centralised systems for healthcare in the developed world: a state-funded and state-run model where patient choice is limited.
Most other developed countries have gone down a far more pragmatic route. They’ve taken the principle of universal access to healthcare and applied it through a variety of mixed models, including social health insurance schemes, healthcare savings accounts and often some level of state provision.
This is what organisations including the BMA often gloss over when discussing pay. They will mention countries like Australia, where UK doctors often relocate, and point out that pay is better – while ignoring how the model of healthcare is vastly different.
In 2022, Australia’s spend on its hybrid healthcare system, as a proportion of GDP, was a percentage point less than the UK: 10pc compared to the UK’s 11.3pc. Still, pay is higher, work-life balance is better, and patients broadly fare better.
This is a familiar story when comparing the UK to its counterparts in Europe, not to mention countries like South Korea or Singapore (the latter of which Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting visited last year, along with Australia, to learn about how these systems work).

It’s the regulated markets in healthcare that tend to prove outstanding in the league tables, as they get money flowing to the right places more effectively – including on salaries.
Meanwhile, Britain has become an outlier in its decision to rely almost completely on tax receipts to fund the NHS, which funnels through layer after layer of bureaucracy.
The NHS has become world-famous for providing the worst kind of service: one that is very expensive but also fails to get good results (even with record levels of cash, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported last autumn that “evidence strongly suggests that the NHS is less productive now than pre-pandemic”).
It’s not just a rotten system, but an unsustainable one. The Government is taxing and spending at record levels, and still it cannot fully explain how it will fund all of the public sector pay rises it authorised last summer, based on recommendations from independent pay review bodies.
No one can begin to fathom where the £50bn needed by 2036-37, as calculated by the IFS, to fund its long-term NHS workforce plan, will come from.
If organisations like the BMA were serious about getting their members better pay, they would warmly embrace some of these tried and tested models that are far more efficient about prioritising where funding is directed. Or, at the very least, they would be calling for labour market reforms within the NHS, to do away with rigid pay structures.
Yet the BMA’s priorities indicate another motivation. This was the union, after all, that voted to cap medical placements back in 2008, and used the consequences of that decision more than a decade on to walk out of wards, citing understaffing. The union doesn’t even stick to its warped line of “free market” reasoning – if it did, it would have never backed the consultants striking, as their pay sits closer to the top of international rankings.
Perhaps there is something ideological at play: a desire to retain power within a monopoly, evidenced by the union’s decision to carry out the longest strike in NHS history during the most dangerous time for the beleaguered healthcare service.
The pretence that the strikes are about patient safety is gone. Talk of reform is treated as blasphemy. The sole purpose of these strikes is pay – but only under very specific conditions, where the unions retain their power as the sole provider of care.
It’s a terrible deal for patients – but it’s a bad deal for BMA members, too.

So very sorry to hear of your problems, Peter. I do hope Yvonne has been seen and assessed and that’s she’ll be back home with you very soon.

I was in A&E, and its associated Medical Assessment Unit over Christmas for five days, only being released on Boxing Day, but it was relatively quiet, so I honestly can understand your worries, but it just goes to show how massively different each day can be for them.

From what you’ve said though, the ambulance crews must have reached critical mass in trying to despatch their patients into medical care. This has to be caused through mis-management somewhere along the line, which is of no comfort to you right now.

I can fully understand your frustrations, but I promise you, the staff there are incredible and will do everything they can to keep her comfortable.

It’s very concerning when a loved one has to be admitted to A&E, and your love, strength and dedication for her is a very powerful thing, which she’s had from you for the many years I’ve known you on Wigan World.

Please let us know how things go, Peter. We all want the best for you both.

Take care.

A very interesting Article Gaffer thanks for taking the trouble to post it.
This para says a lot

"Yet the BMA’s priorities indicate another motivation. This was the union, after all, that voted to cap medical placements back in 2008, and used the consequences of that decision more than a decade on to walk out of wards, citing understaffing. The union doesn’t even stick to its warped line of “free market” reasoning – if it did, it would have never backed the consultants striking, as their pay sits closer to the top of international rankings"

Went back up to the hospital at 10-30 and Yvonne still on a corridor, Lad on next trolley been there since Thursday They have taken bloods to rule out sepsis. Only nurses at their stations no auxiliary staff for most of the day.Doctor came to Yvonne about 4-00 (Doctor 1st saw her about 5-45 in the morning)and said he thought she was dehydrated .I think she is going to be put on a drip and a course of anti biotics and he is shuffling her existing medication around.She will take tablets but keeps them in her mouth and will not swallow them so they are either going to crush her tablets and put them in a drink or give her liquid medication. If every thing goes to plan he said she may be back home for Monday,I think he is being optimistic because at this time she is not even with us she is asleep most of the time She will not remember me being with her over the last two days

Thanks to every body who sent messages for a speedy recovery for Yvonne. Unfortunately she will recover from this latest episode but whether it is short term or long term she will only get worse, Vascular Dementia holds no prisoners and at this time there is no cure. I am led to believe it is one of the UK's biggest killers. I have to think about Yvonne and already have a DNR in place if the worst happens. I hope she is still with me for years to come but only time will tell

God bless you...who cares for the carer .

Hope everything turns out well for you and Yvonne Peter. I can vaguely remember Les Arnold, I think he was Eric's brother.

At 5-00 last night Yvonne had X-rays and while I was waiting they got her off the corridor into a side ward(Ambulatory Assessment Area) then found another bed in MAU(Medical Assessment Unit) Glad to get her in a bed not that she would know the difference. Down side is the visiting times 2-3 and 6-7 while she was on the corridor open visiting. Will go tonight been busy playing catch up today and tomorrow but probably only visit in the evening, if I did both visits time I would get home not much time before going back

Who cares for the carer ?

Billinge Biker I have to care for myself But I have had contact and a visit from a nurse from our doctors surgery to see if I needed any extra help not only for Yvonne but also myself So I am not alone, If I am not healthy then it would have a knock on effect for Yvonne.

It would Peter . "Keep going wit Yed down" that's all you can do