Ogni anno quasi 150.000 persone di età pari o superiore a 90 anni aspettano 12 ore nei pronto soccorso inglesi
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/31/nearly-150000-aged-90-and-above-wait-12-hours-england
di 2ndEarlofLiverpool
Ogni anno quasi 150.000 persone di età pari o superiore a 90 anni aspettano 12 ore nei pronto soccorso inglesi
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/31/nearly-150000-aged-90-and-above-wait-12-hours-england
di 2ndEarlofLiverpool
12 commenti
It’s almost like we need to reopen all those A&E departments and hospital wards we closed years ago.
>One widow told the charity: “My very ill late husband, with a drip attached, was put in a chair … he was desperate to go to the loo and there was no one to take him. He was left with excrement in his pants and was left in this state for over 20 hours. How dreadful he felt – no modesty.”
20. Hours. I can’t even begin to imagine.
Think of the stonking property gains they had though. To the moon.
Not surprised. My 85 year old mother sat for about that time in A&E with a twisted bowel in agony waiting to be seen.
No family support of the elderly, understaffing and gross underpaying of staff and high levels of personal health neglect.. this is the outcome
My grandmother close to this age category had a stroke last week and a head injury from the subsequent fall. 14 hours it took for her to be seen, they kept her in an ambulance until a bed was available. She wasn’t the only one with an ambulance as a bay.
We’ve had our boom period and never prepared for an aging population, instead privatising key parts of the NHS and refusing to fund it when it needed it most. Because of how they treated my nan, there’s potentially dozens of others who could not get an ambulance to hospital and could not be seen even for longer.
I hate to think how many people need to die or suffer life-changing medical neglect before something changes.
The A&E departments are geared towards treating accidents and emergencies. If you turn up with a major or minor injury, you will get a very different and better experience than someone turning up with a chronic condition.
The problem is the A&E departments are understaffed, the acute beds in the hospitals are full, the cottage hospitals are shut and the GPs are useless.
So A&E is the only place these patients have left, and is usually the only place services like 111 and out-of-hours GP phone lines will signpost people to when they become ill.
So what happens when an ever-growing population of 90-year-old patients turns up, poorly, distressed, often confused, but not in life-threatening danger?
They get put in escalation bays, corridors, waiting rooms, etc. while the actual emergencies — the major trauma cases that don’t come through the front door — are dealt with.
They’re waiting for a bed in a ward to become free or for a consultant to have a rare minute with no higher priority cases to deal with so the patient can either be discharged, transferred or admitted.
If GPs weren’t terrible and if local cottage hospitals were still open and if community care wasn’t in such an underfunded state so that the hospitals actually had empty beds for these patients to stay on a ward, the situation would be far better.
A&E isn’t even the bottleneck. It’s the place where all the overspill spills out from a totally congested and overloaded system.
There are systemic capacity issues across the service and then systemic disconnects that delay sending the elderly back home with adequate care. We’ve underinvested for generations, disconnected key services, outsourcing others, and heaped generational debt onto it from servicing PFI. You can’t fix it overnight, but you need a long term strategy and to get a grip.
This is nothing. We’re running a 4.8% deficit in peacetime and they just shelved any disability cuts which means they can’t reduce spending at all.
When the crisis hits you’re going to see what a collapsing health system looks like.
Long A&E waits are a symptom of deeper structural problems, from insufficient social care capacity and limited bed space to outdated hospital buildings. Often, funding is channelled into patching ageing infrastructure rather than rethinking it.
We need a long-term, planned approach to hospital estates. Every hospital – existing and new – should have a defined lifespan, scheduled maintenance and refurbishment milestones, and a designated replacement site held in reserve. This requires local, regional, and national planning but instead I suspect NHS Trust bosses are left to struggle alone.
I can see it locally that despite the hospital being over 50 years old they are instead patch working minor new buildings to the old despite the original core hospital heading towards dilapidation. So much money is being wasted because there’s a lack of plan for longterm management of the site or eventual closure, instead they walk into crises, which may force government intervention.
If they aren’t an emergency and there is higher priority patients then of course they should wait with everyone else. Why should they get a VIP service based purely on age and not on need? Everyone of every age is impacted by the systemic problems.
Well they ruined it all by voting torries all their lives. Sell that house that you got for a pepercorn and get private healthcare. Can’t vote to dismantle public services then complain when they don’t work when you need them.