Ambulance & A&E waits

Once upon a time, Labour was in charge of the nation.  That changed in 2010 when the electorate voted them out and since then, A&E waits have increased.  Targets were redefined to allow them to be met, but the government missed them.  I am not in favour of the four hour target for minor issues as A&E should be for accidents and emergencies, but the target was met when Labour was in power, and now it is not.

But things are even worse than that.  I have spoken to two paramedics and neither of them can recall having to wait outside A&E in 2010.  This is all too common an issue now.  An ambulance that is waiting at A&E with a patient inside it, is an ambulance that cannot attend to another patient who is at home, in the road, laying in the garden etc.  My mother was one of those people who were not able to be picked up by an ambulance a few months ago when she woke with central chest pain. That required a blue light attendance, but she had to go by taxi in the morning to A&E instead.  A patient of mine saw me the morning after she had chest pain in the night. She also called 999 but the ambulance did not get to her and she cancelled her ambulance once her pain went.  When I saw her that morning, her ECG indicated an issue with her heart. I had a patient in a nursing home who had a fractured hip and had to be left on the floor for over 12 hours before an ambulance was able to get to him.

I had blamed COVID for this before, but it is not COVID that is causing this.  It is government incompetence.

The Conservatives have been in charge of our health service and social care since 2010, and things have got worse. Despite them saying that they are to fix things, things continue to get worse.  While they can blame social care as an issue, they have been in charge since 2010 and Boris Johnson was elected in 2019 promising that he had a plan to fix it.