In one of the most pathetic examples of the NHS crisis, a grandmother with leukemia and kidney failure was left on a stretcher for 30 hours in the emergency room.
The 90-year-old, who did not want his name to be disclosed, fell in the nursing home and broke his head and was taken to the hospital by ambulance.
But when he arrived at Whiston Hospital near Liverpool, the bloody retiree was told there were no beds for him.
He went to the emergency room on Saturday evening, April 23, and was not hospitalized until the early hours of Monday, 30 hours later.
Only then did the doctors take him to the next room for a scan to check the extent of the damage.
He had to wait another 10 hours in the hallway until he finally found a bed in a ward.
A grandmother, who did not want to be named and was three weeks before her 90th birthday, was confined to a stretcher for 30 hours at Whiston Hospital near Liverpool.
Doctors had to do an ultrasound to check the extent of the damage, but she was on the stretcher for more than a day and fell off the first night.
The patient’s daughter recalled her mother’s ordeal and said that she fell out of bed at night.
I went there to catch up with my pajamas, incontinence pad, blanket, food and drink,” he said.
By the time her daughter arrived at the hospital, her grandmother had just moved from where she had left off.
She added: “My mom was really confused at this point, she thought the nurses were the caretakers who came to her bungalow and asked someone to get some sweetener for the tea from the kitchen cupboard…”.
Describing her painful wait, her daughter said, “We were in a corridor with many people on stretchers, mostly elderly.
“Because I also have health problems, I went down the hall to another ward to sit, and I really needed to sit.
“There was another elderly patient ahead of us. Along with that person, the paramedics offered to stay with my mother so that the crew could leave with my mother – we had been there for almost an hour by then.”
He was asked to leave after four hours, as there was no place to accommodate relatives in the emergency room.
“We then tried calling and got no response from the emergency room – they just rang – they were understandably super busy,” the woman’s daughter said.
“Later in the evening my son succeeded and they said his grandmother was ‘triage on the stretcher’ but was comfortable and the head injury was awaiting evaluation by a specialist.
“We called back the next morning and my son was told he was still in triage on the stretcher but fell out of the car at night.”
A hospital medical assistant revealed that her mother had her legs stuck to the tram tracks during the night and fell. “Thank God he didn’t hurt himself anymore,” she said.
The woman was eventually hospitalized and arrived in a ward early Monday morning, about 40 hours after her first arrival.
His daughter said: “She was clearly confused by both age-related memory and hearing loss, and possibly head trauma.
“The hospital is clearly understaffed and the demand is huge, but leaving a frail old woman in the hallway for so long is totally unacceptable.
“She wasn’t even the only old person I saw in that hallway, some of them more confused than my mom. It’s like they’re disposable, they have no dignity and this system has become the norm.
“The staff may have hardened, maybe they really have to go to work every day.
“What will happen to the elderly who have no relatives to come and beg or look after during the waiting period in the hospital? This is truly shocking and it can apparently only get worse”.
Her grandmother stayed on the ward for three weeks before being discharged to a nursing home where she currently resides.
A spokesperson for the St Helens and Knowsley NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, said: “In times of great pressure, when demand exceeds the number of beds available to hospitalize patients, it is regrettable that the opportunities arise when patients are hospitalized for longer than we wanted the stretcher to be.
“Unfortunately that was the case in April and demand was extremely high.
“As with all hospitals in the country, we have seen a significant increase in service demand over the last three years.
“Whiston Hospital remains the busiest emergency department most visited in Cheshire and Merseyside.”
They added: “Patient safety is always our priority. We ensure that nursing and healthcare personnel maintain the highest level of care at all times during this unprecedented level of activity.
“Our staff are responding to this increased pressure with exceptional professionalism and are working hard across the hospital to meet this demand.”
The traumatic experience is the latest in a long series of heartbreaking waits in the UK’s emergency room of more than 19,000 patients who saw them wait at least 12 hours for a bed last month.
Pictured: Whiston Hospital in Merseyside
As of May, ED performance data shows that 19,053 people had to wait 12 hours or more to receive treatment, three times longer than the NHS target. The figure is one-fifth lower than last month. Less than three-quarters of patients were within the four-hour emergency room arrival goal, a slight improvement over the past month but the third lowest on record.
That was a fifth less than in the previous month, but emergency services say NHS England statistics are “largely underrepresented” of the actual crisis.
Campaign groups, lawmakers and senior doctors say desperate patients are turning to the ER and emergency rooms because they can’t get an appointment with their practitioners.
Staff shortages and the knock-on effects of the social care crisis and the workload from Covid are other factors responsible for the pressure felt in the emergency room.
Most of the 10,000 NHS beds are elderly patients who cannot go home because of the lack of additional support or space in nursing homes. The lack of space means that patients cannot be moved around the wards, which can result in overcrowding of victims.
Meanwhile, the government has pledged to make clearing wait times a priority, which means a limited number of NHS beds will be filled by patients undergoing surgery, doctors say.
Source: Daily Mail
I am Anne Johnson and I work as an author at the Fashion Vibes. My main area of expertise is beauty related news, but I also have experience in covering other types of stories like entertainment, lifestyle, and health topics. With my years of experience in writing for various publications, I have built strong relationships with many industry insiders. My passion for journalism has enabled me to stay on top of the latest trends and changes in the world of beauty.
