The Red Cross in Great Britain says that because of overcrowding, hospitals are in a “humanitarian crisis.”
A great, big, modern, grown-up nation is suffering third-world conditions in its hospitals and the government can’t seem to alleviate the problem.
The charity said it has dispatched volunteers in several areas of the country to help patients go home and free up hospital beds. It claims cuts to social-care funding by the Conservative government mean some patients can’t be discharged because there is no support available, putting pressure on hospitals.
“We’ve seen people sent home without clothes, some suffer falls and are not found for days, while others are not washed because there is no carer there to help them,” said British Red Cross chief executive Mike Adamson.
“If people don’t receive the care they need and deserve, they will simply end up returning to A&E (accident and emergency), and the cycle begins again.”
Government supporters and health service managers accused the Red Cross of exaggerating the scale of the problem.
The often overstretched National Health Service generally sees a surge in demand during the cold winter months, and NHS England, which manages care in England, said Saturday that “plans remain in place to deal with additional demands.”
The state-funded service, which provides free care to all Britons, is a source of national pride. It is also a political punching bag, with politicians, patients and health care workers trading allegations of underfunding and mismanagement.
Ambulances wait up to 9 hours outside of hospitals for patients to be admitted:
Soaring numbers of sick patients are being forced to wait in ambulances outside Accident & Emergency departments amid a deadly “epidemic” of delays, health officials have warned.
A Telegraph investigation reveals record waits in casualty units, with patients spending up to nine hours in parked ambulances or with paramedics in hospital corridors before being seen by a doctor or nurse.
Emails seen by this newspaper reveal that orders have been given to abandon patients in hospitals after 30 minutes, so that paramedics can return to their duties.
Last night one of Britain’s most senior A&E doctors warned that hospitals had reached a state of “gridlock” with safety at risk and patients “crammed in like sardines”.
Official guidelines state that handovers from ambulances to hospitals should take no longer than 15 minutes.
Not surprisingly, those kinds of delays cost lives:
The NHS is facing a “humanitarian crisis” as hospitals and ambulance services struggle to keep up with rising demand, the British Red Cross has said, following the deaths of two patients after long waits on trolleys in hospital corridors.
Worcestershire Royal hospital launched an investigation on Friday into the deaths and did not deny reports that they had occurred after long waits on trolleys in corridors over the new year period.
On Friday, doctors’ leaders said more patients could die because of the chaos engulfing the NHS.
The deaths prompted claims that the health service was “broken”, and long waits for care, chronic bed shortages and staff shortages were leading towards what the head of Britain’s A&E doctors called “untold patient misery”.
Of course, the reason given by NHS defenders is that the government isn’t giving them enough money. There’s nothing wrong with the model, the defenders say — it’s those heartless conservatives who are demanding that the system perform adequately.
Well, the U.S. has a partially privatized healthcare system and I’ve never heard of an ambulance waiting an hour, much less 9 hours, to deliver a patient to an emergency room with ambulances queued up like they’re waiting to get tickets to a sold-out concert.
The NHS is a national disgrace — but Obamacare advocates like it just fine. They want the American healthcare system to copy the Brits’ wonderful example.
The reality is that this is where the U.S. was headed with Obamacare. Although we appear to have dodged that bullet, what Congress does to replace Obamacare will be more important than ever.
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