Thanks to systemic and deliberate underfunding, Hospital Emergency departments are now a vision of hell.
from thefreeonline by George Monbiot on 24th January 2023
You have to see it to believe it.
A few days after Christmas, I hit my head on a scaffolding bolt.
There was lots of blood and pain down the right side of my face and into my neck. I thought I could live with it, but the following day I noticed a black floater in my right eye.
When, after several hours, it had failed to clear, I phoned 111. They told me to travel immediately to the emergency department at my local hospital. They booked me in for 9pm, my expected arrival time.
I naively imagined I would be seen then. But when I arrived, there were 16 ambulances waiting to offload their patients. The waiting room was a vision of hell.
All the chairs were occupied. Sick people leaned against the walls. Many of the patients, from babies to the extremely aged, looked dangerously unwell. And yet, for all of us, the wait went on and on.
I was seen by a doctor at 3am. During those six hours, I witnessed two things that distressed me more than my own injury.
A man with what appeared to be cardiac symptoms collapsed on to the floor, possibly from a heart attack.
A toddler was screaming “it hurts, it hurts!” for almost three hours without a break. It was devastating to hear.
When I was called by a nurse, halfway through my wait, I asked whether this was an especially busy night. “Oh no,” she told me, “this is quite a quiet one. Most nights recently have been worse.”
Nothing I saw was the fault of the staff, who were working at a frantic pace to manage an impossible load. They looked exhausted.
What I witnessed were the extraordinary but now normal effects of 13 years of austerity. Hospitals across the country appear to be approaching a tipping point.
Continue reading “Public Health System Bleeding Out – while our Cash Goes to Treat the Rich”
An Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle shot down by a unit of Airborne troops in the Kiev region. © Sputnik / Press Service of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
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