An NHS doctor’s advice on why you should do your best to go private –

It’s just before 8am on a Monday morning and my emergency room is crashing. I’ve been available all weekend – I don’t have a penny – but I don’t have time to think about it. Our traffic light system is a sea of ​​red: red for staff, which means we have few doctors and nurses; red for capacity, which means we have too many patients; and red for sharpness, which means that a frightening number of these patients are seriously ill.

Some are connected to a fan. Some don’t even make it to the end of the day, let alone the end of the week.

Then the final traffic light is inevitable: red for flow, which means that many more patients are hospitalized than sent home.

As a result, my department is filled with extreme security. The same is almost always true for almost all emergency services in the UK.

If my ward is under such pressure in the summer heat, when it’s usually a bit quiet, it will be Armageddon in October. Welcome to the forefront of British medicine. In 25 years of first aid expertise, educating junior doctors and managing NHS trusts, I can witness how ten years of austerity policies have eroded every structure that supports our organisation.

Brexit has led to chronic staff shortages. Then came Covid, which put unprecedented pressure on the service but also scapegoated pre-existing issues.

To understand the state of our healthcare system, take a look at how it now spends over £2 billion a year to address allegations of neglect.

Even as a senior staff member and a staunch supporter of the NHS, my advice to patients is: forget it. Instead, beg, borrow, or steal to get customized.

Outside of my hospital in the Midlands, emergency patients are often ridiculed in the ambulance that receives them. In that ambulance, they undergo blood tests and X-rays, guarded by the paramedics who brought them in.

If their diagnosis is positive, they can be discharged without ever leaving the back of the vehicle after consulting a doctor.

To understand the state of our healthcare system, take a look at how more than £2bn a year is spent resolving claims of negligence (archival photos of patients in the ER corridors)

Even if these patients receive care of an acceptable standard, the ambulances involved will be out of service for up to nine hours.

In 80% of cases involving an ambulance, the turnaround time should take 10 to 15 minutes before paramedics can unload, deliver and return to the road. It doesn’t matter if they are one, five, ten or fifteen ambulances stacked outside a ward. One, five, ten or fifteen ambulances unable to respond to the many emergencies we face every day. And it costs lives.

Last year, Professor Kailash Chand OBE, a 73-year-old former vice-president of the British Medical Association, died after suffering a heart attack. His son said the famous doctor “almost certainly would have survived” had the ambulance not been delayed.

More recently, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Katherine Henderson admitted that she would consider calling a taxi or driving a loved one instead of waiting for an ‘ambulance’ if she had to go to the hospital.

And I can understand why: we are on the brink of disaster. As a counselor, I receive alerts every day that the entire healthcare service, not just the emergency department, is at a breaking point regarding cases in my hospital and beyond.

Breast cancer patients have experienced cancellation of critical mammograms due to the pandemic. Nine out of ten NHS dental offices are not recruiting new adult patients. GPs stop en masse.

A sick father of two children waits 20 hours in the emergency room and refuses to come out until he has a blood test, which eventually reveals he has terminal leukemia. A patient whose blood pressure is being monitored remotely during quarantine finally discovers that his problem is not high blood pressure – he has a brain tumor.

Why do we accept this in a modern healthcare system?

As a consultant, it is reported every day that the cases in my hospital and beyond that, not only the emergency department, but the whole health service is at the breaking point (archive photo of the emergency room waiting room)

People have been sounding the alarm for years, including Health and Welfare Minister Steve Barclay. How is Barclay dealing with a public health crisis?

The answer is simple: because top management and officials routinely fire doctors when we identify critical issues involving resources, bureaucracy, and waste.

We emphasize that countless lives were lost unnecessarily due to the systemic collapse. Shoulders are lifted. We are accused of “hypersensitivity”.

Meanwhile, the few six-figure officials who run our 1.4 million organization continue to belittle us.

None of these are sustainable. Overcrowding in wards providing emergency or emergency care deaths by all means: delays, errors, omissions, repetitions.

It is impossible to run a system in violent crash mode indefinitely. Debts are growing. The pressure is so great that more and more doctors are retiring early or working part time. Often at this time of year, many find themselves out of reach rather than working grueling shifts in high-stress wards. We provide local doctors between £80 and £100 per hour, which is the NHS equivalent of teachers, but my department still can’t fill shifts.

It’s not just health problems that cause this crisis. The dire failures of the British welfare system also have ripple effects.

In a medium-sized hospital like mine, there are between 60 and 80 patients who don’t need to be there. But they have nowhere else to go.

Just as mental health patients end up in jail for not receiving psychiatric care, the elderly are stuck in hospital beds in corridors because social care is even worse than health care.

Last Saturday evening, a psychiatric patient came for treatment. When I asked how he was the next Tuesday, I was told he was still on the ward and staying in a bed as there were no psychiatric beds in the area.

Outside of my hospital in the Midlands, emergencies are usually handled in the ambulance that receives them.

Our anxiety about end-of-life sums up just how embarrassing the situation is. There are patients we know will die in hospitals across the country. Advanced medications—medicines to suppress secretion, discomfort, pain, and nausea—in the last hours of a person’s life are given—but nothing more.

They die in emergency rooms, their privacy and dignity are denied at the time of death, their loved ones are not given time or space to suffer.

Hospital staff should prioritize patients in need of emergency care in the last hours of their lives.

Imagine saying your last goodbye to your mother, spouse or baby as a doctor in the next room frantically trying to resuscitate a patient having a heart attack. It is inhuman, uncivilized and completely devoid of dignity.

Conspiracy theorists like to argue that the collapse of the NHS was designed around the plan, making the Conservatives ripe for privatisation.

But I don’t think what happened was planned: It’s incompetence, neglect and underinvestment. Not organized; this is chaos.

Dr. Emma Jones, a Midlands-based emergency room consultant, writes under the pseudonym

This article was originally published on Unherd.com.