Casualty units are strained beyond reasonable levels of care, cautions a specialist with 25 years of expertise. The consultant also asked patients to do what they can to pay for private treatment.
Because the NHS is “on the verge of disaster,” a senior NHS consultant is advising patients to “beg, borrow, or steal” to pay for private treatment.
Dr Emma Jones cautioned, “From a safety standpoint, my department is pushed beyond capacity. The same is true for practically every A&E department in the UK at any given moment.”
Every day, she witnessed evidence at her hospital and elsewhere that the entire NHS, not just A&E, is near breaking point, she said.
According to the most recent government estimates, up to 500 people die in England each week as a result of the NHS’s failure to provide emergency care. Dr. Jones, an experienced casualty specialist in a Midlands hospital, warned of “Armageddon” when demand rises in the autumn, considering the strain departments are under in the summer.
“Even as a senior employee and staunch supporter of the NHS, my advise to patients is this: forget it,” she wrote. Instead, beg, borrow, or steal to go private.”
She testified that a decade of austerity had undermined “every structure” sustaining the health care after 25 years of specialisation in A&E treatment.
Ambulances are unable to respond to emergency calls because they must wait for so long outside hospitals due to bed shortages. Wait times are so long that one patient allegedly waited 40 hours for an ambulance last week, and another 87-year-old man reportedly spent 15 hours on the ground outside in the rain.
According to NHS Digital data, a million individuals spent 12 hours in casualty between April last year and March this year.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has issued a warning about the “size and depth of the challenge that urgent and emergency care is confronted with.”
Overcrowding in A&E kills people through delays, mistakes, omissions, and duplications, according to Dr. Jones, and it was unsustainable to keep a system in major incident mode perpetually as backlogs grew.
She described the situation as “shameful,” disclosing that patients in hospitals throughout the UK who are about to die receive medicine to relieve discomfort, agony, and nausea in their final hours, but not much more.
Instead of having beds on wards, people are dying in cubicles in casualty departments, she claims, denying them privacy and dignity, and denying loved ones the time and space to grieve.
Dr. Jones wrote, “Imagine saying your final goodbyes to your mother, partner, or kid while a doctor in the adjacent cubicle is desperately attempting to rescue a cardiac arrest patient.”
It is brutal, uncivilised, and devoid of decency.” She disputed that the Conservatives were planning to privatise the NHS, instead blaming the upheaval on “incompetence, neglect, and underinvestment.”
The public health issue has emerged as a result of senior management and civil officials habitually “gaslighting” professionals who raise concerns about funding, bureaucracy, and waste.
When physicians remind out that numerous lives are being lost due to systemic collapse, she says, “shoulders are shrugged.”
