{"id":1115,"date":"2023-01-09T14:00:53","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T14:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/cons\/"},"modified":"2023-01-09T14:00:53","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T14:00:53","slug":"cons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/cons\/","title":{"rendered":"A&E consultant describes the current NHS crisis as \u201chuman tragedy\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An anonymous A&E consultant has described the current crisis in the NHS as \u201chuman tragedy\u201d in i News. \n\n\u201cThe president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr Adrian Boyle, has said as many as 500 people could be dying each week because of delays to emergency care<\/a>.\n\n\u201cLet me tell you some that might be in that number,\u201d the consultant said. \u201cThe 89-year-old who fell in the bathroom who called an ambulance but couldn\u2019t get one for nine hours, so the sepsis which had caused him to fall killed him. Had I seen him within a couple of hours it could have been avoided. Maybe.\n\n\u201cThe 54-year-old with three teenage children who has severe asthma came into A&E driven by his 17-year-old because he was so breathless. He collapsed and died outside because he\u2019d waited too long because he knew the system was struggling. Maybe if he\u2019d spoken to his GP things might have been different for him. Maybe if he\u2019d brought himself sooner. Maybe.\n\n\u201cThe 67-year-old grandmother who died from her chest infection, maybe because there were not enough people to keep an eye on her on the ward. Maybe if the nurses hadn\u2019t been redeployed to open up another area of beds, so there would be more than two nurses to 24 patients. Maybe if the junior doctor had been able to review her sooner. Maybe.\n\n\u201cThe lady with cerebral palsy who died from her chest infection \u2013 maybe if she\u2019d not had to wait outside for six hours and had to wait 10 hours for an ambulance. Maybe if there\u2019d been a bed on the ward. Or she\u2019d been seen sooner, or reviewed more. Maybe.\n\n\u201cAnother friend of mine said she felt like it was a war zone. It is. We have been firefighting for at least a decade. It is now so much worse<\/a>.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe consultant described arriving for the 7am handover on a bank holiday shift last week and being met by a night team of three junior doctors who were \u201cbroken\u201d and \u201cunable to do any more\u201d.\n\nDAUK Co-chair also commented on i News: \n\n\u201cThe entire NHS is overstretched and all parties must put their election-based strategies aside and focus on the immediate actions that can be taken to save lives in the current crisis. The whole system has collapsed \u2013 from GP services dealing with record numbers of patients to the ambulance service, to our hospitals and the social care sector.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been told that between 300 and 500 people appear to be dying each week because of avoidable delays in emergency NHS care. Winters are always a challenge but veteran NHS staff are speaking up to report the worst conditions they have seen within the service in their entire careers. The whole system requires urgent investment and action is needed right now.\u201d\n\nRead the full news here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An anonymous A&E consultant has described the current crisis in the NHS as \u201chuman tragedy\u201d in i News. \u201cThe president of the Royal College of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dauk-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}