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Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

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Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#191

Post by notahacker »

dekhn wrote: post #188
adolph wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you can't wait 12 hours you become excess mortality. Sometime before the 12 hour period, one must make a choice whether to seek care or not.

the 12 hour wait is once the person enters the doors of the facility. In a hospital, if you walk into the ER, people are observing you closely and expediting people at immediate risk of death. A person who can sit in a chair for 12 hours waiting didn't have an emergency. Instead, they were using the ER for non-urgent care.

If the people triaged into 8-12 hour queues have a 16% higher chance of dying in the next month, that's a pretty obvious indication that many of them are, in fact, in critical condition.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#192

Post by prof-dr-ir »

oliwarner wrote: post #116

This isn't a collapse of emergency healthcare, it's a very predicted collapse of community social care: hospitals can't discharge if they need a care home place that doesn't exist. Without inpatient bed availability, ERs and AMUs can't admit to specialties and everything gums up at the front door. Let's be clear: we do need many more doctors and nurses, but the existing ones can't do their jobs because their wards ha…

This certainly makes a lot of sense, and although I am happy to believe you I am having a hard time convincing my grandma that you are right.

Do you maybe have a source for your claims that would convince her? A simple news article from a reputable source would probably suffice.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#193

Post by johnday »

cas14655 wrote: post #146

Quoted post unavailable.

What exactly is the point you are trying to make?

Yes, under a pro-spending, forward-looking government (such as the one we had from roughly 1997 to 2010), staffed public services improved and a trajectory was laid down for future improvements.

Under pro-austerity, myopic governments (such as the one we had from 2010 until now), public services have been rotting from the inside.

It's not difficult to draw a straight line from one to the other. Pouring money into "diversity" is certainly nothing to do with it, and that goes double for our current reigning party.

For what it's worth, it's a testament to the overall resilience of the NHS as a service that it has broadly managed to weather the storm of long-term underfunding and is likely going to continue on track until a forward-looking government is able to come back and breathe life back into it again. Roll on 2024.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#195

Post by dredmorbius »

simonswords82 wrote: post #95
M2Ys4U wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This Twitter chap" is a journalist at the Financial Times and is a senior fellow at the London School of Economics. He's not just some rando bashing government...

So you're saying as a result of these two positions that he holds he cannot possibly be wrong and I should blindly trust anything he says so long as he shows some workings?

Your initial comment strongly suggested distrusting the information strictly based on the source, "this Twitter chap".

Reputation isn't everything. But it's a useful guide.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#196

Post by ericmay »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #179
cjbgkagh wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s not pretend corruption is unique to capitalism.

That's not what I said.

It definitely came across that way to me in your comment as well. You associated corruption with capitalism via "and that's the name of the game" as though the objective of capitalism is to destroy public institutions, when what's actually the case is that the objective of corrupt people is to destroy or co-opt public institutions for their own benefit. The economic system is largely immaterial in that effort. Actually, you could argue the opposite in that capitalism helps prop up public institutions versus other economic systems because there are minimum levels of regulation, rule of law, and security that are required for capitalistic economies (ranging from the US, to Sweden, to Singapore) to function and for capital owners to profit.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#197

Post by dekhn »

notahacker wrote: post #191
dekhn wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the 12 hour wait is once the person enters the doors of the facility. In a hospital, if you walk into the ER, people are observing you closely and expediting people at immediate risk of death. A person who can sit in a chair for 12 hours waiting didn't have an emergency. Instead, they were using the ER for non-urgent care.

If the people triaged into 8-12 hour queues have a 16% higher chance of dying in the next month, that's a pretty obvious indication that many of them are, in fact, in critical condition.

I wouldn't trust a stat like that without digging into the underlying causation. The whole twitter presentation is a nice narrative but I see many places where it could just be outright wrong, or saying misleading things (I work in medical biology and have plenty of familiarity with how hospitals run their ERs).

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#199

Post by c7DJTLrn »

My 80 year old grandfather was due for a knee operation and it was delayed twice. On the day after the second time it was delayed, his knee collapsed and he smacked his head on the concrete floor. His speech was slurred, his vision was affected, and he was in extreme pain. Bearing in mind in his younger years he's had eyes slashed open and fingers cut off, so he has a high pain threshold. The ambulance took six hours to arrive. If his brain was bleeding he would have died. When they arrived at the hospital they were waiting a further six hours to be seen.

The NHS is a tragedy and I almost wish they'd just hurry up and privatise it so I don't have to pay with it with my taxes anymore, which means the Tories achieved their goal.

If I didn't have private healthcare I'd have left the UK by now. I was born and raised here, so I think that says something.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#200

Post by jfk13 »

xtracto wrote: post #124
oliwarner wrote: post #116

This isn't a collapse of emergency healthcare, it's a very predicted collapse of community social care: hospitals can't discharge if they need a care home place that doesn't exist. Without inpatient bed availability, ERs and AMUs can't admit to specialties and everything gums up at the front door. Let's be clear: we do need many more doctors and nurses, but the existing ones can't do their jobs because their wards ha…

It is too bad that corrupt government officials keep systemically defunding Social Health programs with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense). Then they point to the deficient healthcare and blame the "socialized" aspect of it for the issues. Here in Mexico we've seen it all play out: We had an amazing social healthcare system (in the form of the IMSS) in the 70s and 8…

> Back in 2004 when I lived in the UK, the NHS was really good. And I remember hearing at that time that it was nothing compared to the NHS in the 80s and 90s.

That sounds like some seriously rose-tinted nostalgia to me. Yes, the NHS certainly has its problems. But within the past decade, my wife has been through several fairly major health issues, including cancer, and our overall experience of UK healthcare has been quite positive.

She is from the US (and had "good" insurance there), but feels that the UK system has served her far better than the American ever did.

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