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A comment on Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week. Parent comment

Re:Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costin... by oliwarner on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @06:28PM (#32572431)
If you come to our local DGH's A&E in an ambulance and you're not a trauma or cardiac or stroke, you face seven to twenty hour wait in the carpark.

You will see multiple paramedics as they change shifts in situ.

In fairness the ambulance service has scaled amazingly well given most of their staff are now pegged in hospital carparks, but yes, waiting times for critical calls are extended, people are dying because ambulances aren't available.

All because they can't hand over to A&E. Because A&E can't ingest patients. Because wards can't discharge. Because care homes don't exist.

It's that simple. If you doubled the number of community care placements, staff, etc, you'd buy the NHS another ten years.

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Re:Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costin... by tomatocracy on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @07:04PM (#32572750)
On top of that, it's also now significantly harder to get a GP appointment vs 2-3 years ago so more people are ending up in A&E instead. My own GP surgery has gone from offering "turn up and wait for an appointment" at set times 4 days a week (and call to book a day ahead otherwise) to "you can't do anything without booking in the online system and then the GP will call you at a totally unpredictable time 3 days later when you're not available" because they think its "better" (which I suspect means because it has cut GP workload).
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