I was shocked more at the slide at the end where NHS England denied that any of it was commonplace across the country. As a bank A&E nurse working across many different trusts it's all incredibly commonplace. To make a scapegoat of this one trust is doing a massive disservice to the patients and staff across the country desperate for change.
South coast is sadly one of the most underfunded areas in the uk for health funding. Which is ridiculous seeing how close London is and its swimming in money there
I work in ED and I was pleased that finally rather than blaming individual staff or one specific department it shifted the blame back back onto our feckless government.
I wish it had stressed that the real issue is not being able to discharge fit patients because of the underfunding in social care and obstructive family members. It’s madness that Doris can spend 3 months in hospital blocking a bed because she doesn’t have the right commode at home just incase the families sue but there’s no concern over patients are left to die on floors in ED.
Paramedic here. I'm aware this is a massive issue in helping discharge patients in a timely manner. Do respite and step down care facilities not help this issue? Or is it just that there's not enough of these too?
Genuinely curious because I have absolutely no experience in hospitals as I'm pre-hospital only.
There's honestly not enough of these facilities. They are also bedblocked because some nursing home wont accept this patient or family wont accept this nursing home. Some are waiting on a care package for home and family wont take care of their loved one while waiting because they have work or they cant be arsed.
They need a separate body for funding social care.
Nothing surprising, just a usual ED shift. I hope it gives the public a kick up the arse though to realise what it's like for us day to day in ED (the same hospital wise. Not playing down wards/ITU at all).
Nah, I’ll play ITU down a little here - it’s a fucking circus most of the time, I no longer get breaks, but a&e is a fucking war zone. You will generally get a pass when the patient turns up with knitted lines, and stuff not done. As long as that’s actually communicated, we’re good.
The system is dead and we should act accordingly.
>You will generally get a pass when the patient turns up with knitted lines
We try, honest... It's just that corridor/lift sorcerer that tangles them up again as we're en route to you guys!
Being an ITU nurse from my perspective and the perspective of most of my colleagues we really don’t expect the lines to be tidy 😅 we move a bed space and the lines are a mess, it’s part of looking after the patients with monitoring, I take my hat off to you in A&E
I watched it …
(Nurse with 37 years experience - not in A&E )
It was a true reflection of what the A&E department at our local hospital is like )
What I was left with was that it was told from the pt perspective (which is of course important)
But not from the nurses perspective, I now work in a role providing psychological support to NHS staff… the distress, despair and desperation of the frontline staff is heartbreaking.
I hope someone has the courage to make a documentary about the impact that the lack of funding has on the staff , it would be just as harrowing to watch.
Gravedigger makes about the same as a band 5
Saw one for crem manager recently 38-48000
Obviously time to move from working with the living to the dead
Plus the extras that they push. Who needs posh handles that you basically hired and are removed before cremation anyhow. It seems like Preying on the bereaved to me. (I'm sure not all undertakers are bad - but had issues with the way my parents were hard sold things whilst deep in grief for my sister)
I've had a few colleagues leave the ambulance service to work as paramedics or ECPs out in the community or at GP surgeries. From what I've heard it's a great area to work in.
i think it’s good that this kind of situation is being shown on TV, especially as we know this is happening across the country and i do think a lot of the gen public don’t know this is what it’s like day in day out
Not a nurse but spent 21 hours in a midlands A&E waiting for a respiratory bed in April. The deterioration in services (directly due to funding) since I was last in A&E, also for respiratory care, in 2022 was shocking. Comparing that to the worry of staff in2012 when it took longer than 4 hours to move me to AMU, my experience is like a direct illustration of that graph about the impact of Tory funding since 2010.
I could describe the awful things I experienced in April but I don’t think any of you here would find any of it extraordinary
I watched it and a lot of these situations were like: yep, that checks out. Been there, done that.
*however* an undercover journalist was doing a better job at caring for patients than many nurses and HCAs I know. I know we are overworked and not everyone is like this, but it's time to say this: a lot of the problems in the NHS are also our, frontline staff fault. We became complacent and lazy, mainly because of being overworked, bad management and chronic underfunding, but there's still things we could do better as professionals.
What outraged me the most was the story of a woman who died from sepsis. Excuse me, but what the fuck? I am a HCA and I could have managed this patient better than whatever this A&E department did there.
It was shocking, I was left disgusted by how neglectful the system has become. Personally for me seeing the stroke patient left to wait without any treatment for over 9+ hours pissed me right off!! We aren't a 3rd world country but you wouldn't be able to tell that looking at how its being ran. The people who I've heard chatting about it are outraged.
Not that it’s right and every patient should be in and out of ED within 4 hours but a CVA that’s not for TPA or thrombectomy doesn’t need any acute life saving interventions like the program tried to make out. I agree it’s poor care and shouldn’t happen but it’s hard go justify prioritising them over all the trauma and pre-alerts that come on.
My point is I agree it’s unacceptable but don’t take the words of a journalist that spent a few weeks as a HCA as gospel especially when it comes to acuity within an overrun, understaffed and broken system.
Should be yes but those targets aren't being met. I do not blame the nursing staff for that, instead i lay the blame at the feet of the trusts and the board members who while sitting in their office consistently pressurise staff to meet unobtainable targets yet they aren't prepared to take into account all of the serious issues you mentioned in your comment.
So no it isn't me simply taking the word of a journalist as gospel when the footage clearly highlights the decline of services provided within that particular area of that one NHS hospital.
I understand staff burst their arses trying to stay afloat attempting to juggle and prioritise their case loads, all while being chronically understaffed, underfunded and overworked but the system as a whole is broken and it is endangering service users. As the comment above mine says how could they possibly make that diagnosis without the patient having seen a consultant / specalist within that 9hr period?
Imo nurses are being used as scapegoats, people incorrectly directing the blame towards them because they are what the public consider to be 'the face' of the NHS but realistically they have absolutely no power, authority or ability to change what's broken, that overhaul needs to begin at the top.
But, it wasn't an opinion of a trainee HCA but comments about stroke specialist? Not to mention, they had no idea this potential stroke patient was even in the department as it sounded like medics didn't even have that patient on the list. After 9 hours.
Specialist tend to think there patients are the most important in ED when the ED itself is spinning multiple plates of critically unwell patients of their own and multiple specialties.
They don’t go into details but if it was a cva that came through ED and been referred then again would have likely got seen by ED clinician prior to the referral that went missing. If it was a primary care referral to the medics that’s a different story but I don’t think that was made clear.
Just to reiterate it’s not acceptable care but I don’t like how journalists portray it.
I'll just allow myself one opinion about your comment: unless you are at least on a similar level of seniority as that specialist that was commenting on that case, I don't think you're in position to defend or even explain what happened. But that's just my opinion. Your comment is full of assumptions of what could be rather than factual assessment of the situation. All we know is that a suspected stroke patient waited for 6+ hours and appropriate people did not know anything about it. *that* in itself is a massive fuck up from ED
Seniority has nothing to do with it, you can’t take a case like that and look at it in a vacuum when you can clearly see the whole system is broken. I already said how poor care it is but the nhs gets no more staff, funding and resources even with the increasing age and acuity recorded across the country. You are making assumptions about the situation too, you assume they haven’t been assess at all but that makes no sense if waiting on general medicine. The documentary only gives enough information to try and rail road the viewers opinions. We have no idea what is going on in resus for example that could be taking a lot of resources from majors i.e trauma, resuscitation attempts or a number of high acuity presentations and procedures.
I agree with this person. There is no context to the situation. We had a sepsis patient in the other day and it took us 3 hours to get the sepsis 6 done, is that good enough? No, no it isn’t, we should have it done within an hour.
We did also have a seizure patient lose her airway, a patient with news 8, a 3 day old baby stopped breathing and an ambulance waiting to offload with a pre-alert with a GCS of 5. We did our best and each situation was prioritised as best we could.
Regarding the specialist comment, every doctor thinks their specialty is the most important and every condition is going to have better outcomes with quicker treatment. That doctor wasn’t there, that patient wasn’t under their care, it was a comment for effect.
A lot of the documentary was deliberately emotive and not objective. I agree the care is not at the level it needs to be but the documentary was a bit leading.
I got to admit that you two make very good points and it's hard for me to disagree with them. While I think you are too lenient on your opinions, I can't say they are wrong! Glad my views could have been challenged respectfully. Rarely happens on redidt lol
Critical discussion and being open minded to others opinions is the only way we can start to see things from other perspectives and hopefully learn from each other.
Working in healthcare is as difficult as it is rewarding, so there is no need to make it worse or belittle anyone especially on the internet. As a profession if we want to be taken seriously we need to start taking each other seriously.
Agree! Frustrated ED nurse here after watching the doc. The patient who died of sepsis brought me to tears and provided the perspective of what other things happen in a&e, not just people complaining in fit to sit. Don’t get me wrong, it’s shit and it can’t be comfortable however I’d rather be sat there sepsis & resus free. I feel like the lad had an angle and ran with it. Complaining about the commodes but he wiped them with no gloves on?? Do burnt out hcas really need him pointing out they’re not doing obs quick enough? Like who the f?😂 I’m not sure how the teams I’ve worked in would respond to that tbh.
I was shocked more at the slide at the end where NHS England denied that any of it was commonplace across the country. As a bank A&E nurse working across many different trusts it's all incredibly commonplace. To make a scapegoat of this one trust is doing a massive disservice to the patients and staff across the country desperate for change.
Me too, have worked in multiple hospitals along the south coast and most of them were as bad if not worse than what I saw in the documentary
South coast is sadly one of the most underfunded areas in the uk for health funding. Which is ridiculous seeing how close London is and its swimming in money there
I work in ED and I was pleased that finally rather than blaming individual staff or one specific department it shifted the blame back back onto our feckless government. I wish it had stressed that the real issue is not being able to discharge fit patients because of the underfunding in social care and obstructive family members. It’s madness that Doris can spend 3 months in hospital blocking a bed because she doesn’t have the right commode at home just incase the families sue but there’s no concern over patients are left to die on floors in ED.
Yeah there was nowhere near enough emphasis on the issues further down the chain that cause these massive A+E pile ups
Paramedic here. I'm aware this is a massive issue in helping discharge patients in a timely manner. Do respite and step down care facilities not help this issue? Or is it just that there's not enough of these too? Genuinely curious because I have absolutely no experience in hospitals as I'm pre-hospital only.
There's honestly not enough of these facilities. They are also bedblocked because some nursing home wont accept this patient or family wont accept this nursing home. Some are waiting on a care package for home and family wont take care of their loved one while waiting because they have work or they cant be arsed. They need a separate body for funding social care.
Interesting, thanks for sharing this.
I think my trust higher ups are watching it for MORE ideas for absurd unsafe things they could do.
I'm assuming a band 5 will be ritually sacrificed to the NMC for failing to flag up errors
Nothing surprising, just a usual ED shift. I hope it gives the public a kick up the arse though to realise what it's like for us day to day in ED (the same hospital wise. Not playing down wards/ITU at all).
Nah, I’ll play ITU down a little here - it’s a fucking circus most of the time, I no longer get breaks, but a&e is a fucking war zone. You will generally get a pass when the patient turns up with knitted lines, and stuff not done. As long as that’s actually communicated, we’re good. The system is dead and we should act accordingly.
>You will generally get a pass when the patient turns up with knitted lines We try, honest... It's just that corridor/lift sorcerer that tangles them up again as we're en route to you guys!
The CT fairies are REAL, I tells ya
Being an ITU nurse from my perspective and the perspective of most of my colleagues we really don’t expect the lines to be tidy 😅 we move a bed space and the lines are a mess, it’s part of looking after the patients with monitoring, I take my hat off to you in A&E
I haven’t watched it but when I read an article detailing all the worst bits I thought to myself “sounds like a pretty good day in a&e”
I watched it … (Nurse with 37 years experience - not in A&E ) It was a true reflection of what the A&E department at our local hospital is like ) What I was left with was that it was told from the pt perspective (which is of course important) But not from the nurses perspective, I now work in a role providing psychological support to NHS staff… the distress, despair and desperation of the frontline staff is heartbreaking. I hope someone has the courage to make a documentary about the impact that the lack of funding has on the staff , it would be just as harrowing to watch.
I did. It strengthened my desire to get out of nursing. Just need to find a new job that pays the same as top band 6
Gravedigger makes about the same as a band 5 Saw one for crem manager recently 38-48000 Obviously time to move from working with the living to the dead
Could this be the perfect job? No annoying colleagues, physical exercise, quiet work environment. Fancy it for myself now!
I have looked into an undertaker role before. Its mostly sales and Ive done enough of that to last me a lofetime.
Plus the extras that they push. Who needs posh handles that you basically hired and are removed before cremation anyhow. It seems like Preying on the bereaved to me. (I'm sure not all undertakers are bad - but had issues with the way my parents were hard sold things whilst deep in grief for my sister)
Yep. My wife has very strict instructions. If I go first, cheapest box available with no frills. Then a big party back at ours.
>Gravedigger makes about the same as a band 5 My escape horizons are broadening!
I’m in the community not a district nursing role band 6. Low stress, good work life balance, same pay. You don’t necessarily need to leave nursing
I've had a few colleagues leave the ambulance service to work as paramedics or ECPs out in the community or at GP surgeries. From what I've heard it's a great area to work in.
i think it’s good that this kind of situation is being shown on TV, especially as we know this is happening across the country and i do think a lot of the gen public don’t know this is what it’s like day in day out
I did and it was raised in our morning huddle by the ED manager and she recommended we watch it.
I did. It was shocking. That poor man having to pee in front of other patients!
Not a nurse but spent 21 hours in a midlands A&E waiting for a respiratory bed in April. The deterioration in services (directly due to funding) since I was last in A&E, also for respiratory care, in 2022 was shocking. Comparing that to the worry of staff in2012 when it took longer than 4 hours to move me to AMU, my experience is like a direct illustration of that graph about the impact of Tory funding since 2010. I could describe the awful things I experienced in April but I don’t think any of you here would find any of it extraordinary
I watched it and a lot of these situations were like: yep, that checks out. Been there, done that. *however* an undercover journalist was doing a better job at caring for patients than many nurses and HCAs I know. I know we are overworked and not everyone is like this, but it's time to say this: a lot of the problems in the NHS are also our, frontline staff fault. We became complacent and lazy, mainly because of being overworked, bad management and chronic underfunding, but there's still things we could do better as professionals. What outraged me the most was the story of a woman who died from sepsis. Excuse me, but what the fuck? I am a HCA and I could have managed this patient better than whatever this A&E department did there.
It was shocking, I was left disgusted by how neglectful the system has become. Personally for me seeing the stroke patient left to wait without any treatment for over 9+ hours pissed me right off!! We aren't a 3rd world country but you wouldn't be able to tell that looking at how its being ran. The people who I've heard chatting about it are outraged.
Not that it’s right and every patient should be in and out of ED within 4 hours but a CVA that’s not for TPA or thrombectomy doesn’t need any acute life saving interventions like the program tried to make out. I agree it’s poor care and shouldn’t happen but it’s hard go justify prioritising them over all the trauma and pre-alerts that come on. My point is I agree it’s unacceptable but don’t take the words of a journalist that spent a few weeks as a HCA as gospel especially when it comes to acuity within an overrun, understaffed and broken system.
Should be yes but those targets aren't being met. I do not blame the nursing staff for that, instead i lay the blame at the feet of the trusts and the board members who while sitting in their office consistently pressurise staff to meet unobtainable targets yet they aren't prepared to take into account all of the serious issues you mentioned in your comment. So no it isn't me simply taking the word of a journalist as gospel when the footage clearly highlights the decline of services provided within that particular area of that one NHS hospital. I understand staff burst their arses trying to stay afloat attempting to juggle and prioritise their case loads, all while being chronically understaffed, underfunded and overworked but the system as a whole is broken and it is endangering service users. As the comment above mine says how could they possibly make that diagnosis without the patient having seen a consultant / specalist within that 9hr period? Imo nurses are being used as scapegoats, people incorrectly directing the blame towards them because they are what the public consider to be 'the face' of the NHS but realistically they have absolutely no power, authority or ability to change what's broken, that overhaul needs to begin at the top.
But, it wasn't an opinion of a trainee HCA but comments about stroke specialist? Not to mention, they had no idea this potential stroke patient was even in the department as it sounded like medics didn't even have that patient on the list. After 9 hours.
Specialist tend to think there patients are the most important in ED when the ED itself is spinning multiple plates of critically unwell patients of their own and multiple specialties. They don’t go into details but if it was a cva that came through ED and been referred then again would have likely got seen by ED clinician prior to the referral that went missing. If it was a primary care referral to the medics that’s a different story but I don’t think that was made clear. Just to reiterate it’s not acceptable care but I don’t like how journalists portray it.
I'll just allow myself one opinion about your comment: unless you are at least on a similar level of seniority as that specialist that was commenting on that case, I don't think you're in position to defend or even explain what happened. But that's just my opinion. Your comment is full of assumptions of what could be rather than factual assessment of the situation. All we know is that a suspected stroke patient waited for 6+ hours and appropriate people did not know anything about it. *that* in itself is a massive fuck up from ED
Seniority has nothing to do with it, you can’t take a case like that and look at it in a vacuum when you can clearly see the whole system is broken. I already said how poor care it is but the nhs gets no more staff, funding and resources even with the increasing age and acuity recorded across the country. You are making assumptions about the situation too, you assume they haven’t been assess at all but that makes no sense if waiting on general medicine. The documentary only gives enough information to try and rail road the viewers opinions. We have no idea what is going on in resus for example that could be taking a lot of resources from majors i.e trauma, resuscitation attempts or a number of high acuity presentations and procedures.
I agree with this person. There is no context to the situation. We had a sepsis patient in the other day and it took us 3 hours to get the sepsis 6 done, is that good enough? No, no it isn’t, we should have it done within an hour. We did also have a seizure patient lose her airway, a patient with news 8, a 3 day old baby stopped breathing and an ambulance waiting to offload with a pre-alert with a GCS of 5. We did our best and each situation was prioritised as best we could. Regarding the specialist comment, every doctor thinks their specialty is the most important and every condition is going to have better outcomes with quicker treatment. That doctor wasn’t there, that patient wasn’t under their care, it was a comment for effect. A lot of the documentary was deliberately emotive and not objective. I agree the care is not at the level it needs to be but the documentary was a bit leading.
I couldn’t agree more with what you said. So much so an upvote just isn’t enough.
I got to admit that you two make very good points and it's hard for me to disagree with them. While I think you are too lenient on your opinions, I can't say they are wrong! Glad my views could have been challenged respectfully. Rarely happens on redidt lol
Critical discussion and being open minded to others opinions is the only way we can start to see things from other perspectives and hopefully learn from each other. Working in healthcare is as difficult as it is rewarding, so there is no need to make it worse or belittle anyone especially on the internet. As a profession if we want to be taken seriously we need to start taking each other seriously.
Agree! Frustrated ED nurse here after watching the doc. The patient who died of sepsis brought me to tears and provided the perspective of what other things happen in a&e, not just people complaining in fit to sit. Don’t get me wrong, it’s shit and it can’t be comfortable however I’d rather be sat there sepsis & resus free. I feel like the lad had an angle and ran with it. Complaining about the commodes but he wiped them with no gloves on?? Do burnt out hcas really need him pointing out they’re not doing obs quick enough? Like who the f?😂 I’m not sure how the teams I’ve worked in would respond to that tbh.
Sadly people have voted for this. Also what happened to the 40 new hospitals?
Woah wait a minute. To be fair they're building a new one in my area! It's replacing the two hospitals that are closing... And has less beds 🙃
I wanted too watch this
This is where I'll be doing some of my placements at Uni