Congratulations St. Peters Accident and Emergency, you got a
prize for third place.
This article from The Daily Telegraph is a review of the waiting
time figures for Accident and Emergency departments around the country over the
last year.
And here are the results (in reverse order);
In third place; Ashford and St Peter’s A and E won its prize
for keeping a patient waiting 33 hours on a trolley.
They were only beaten by waits of 37 hours and the champion
record holder who made a patient sweat it out on a trolley for over 71 hours.
Telegraph.co.uk
By Miranda
Prynne, News Reporter
12 Nov 2013
Around
12,000 patients spent at least 12 hours lying on trolleys after being
admitted to
A&E last year, according to new figures
A further
250 people waited for treatment in casualty wards for 24 hours or
more, a
Freedom of Information request revealed.
One person
was left for 71 hours and 34 minutes, nearly three days, at North
West London
trust, which runs Northwick Park and Central Middlesex A&E
departments.
In another
shocking case a patient waited 37 hours at Royal Liverpool and
Broadgreen
A&E while a third was left for 33 hours at Ashford and St Peter’s in
Chertsey,
Surrey.
Health
campaigners claimed the figures were more evidence of the growing crisis in
hospitals’ emergency wards.
The figures
came as the government received a warning that the closure of 50 out of 230 NHS
walk-in centres in the last three years was putting extra strain on A&E
units.
Speaking to
the Daily Mail, Roger Goss, of Patient Concern, said: “Patients who
are forced
to spend that length of time on trolleys will be in a far worse state than when
they arrived.
“People
feel they have nowhere else to go. They can’t get an appointment with
their GP
and their out-of-hours service – NHS 111 – tells them to go to A&E.”
Peter
Carter, of the Royal College of Nursing, said patients left waiting on
trolleys
would be “in distress”. He said: “The
types of people on the trolleys for days are the elderly. “These are the people who go to the back of
the queue. While they are in distress and discomfort.”
Medical
experts have already issued several warnings of a looming winter crisis
in A&E
departments, which are dealing increased patient numbers and staff
shortages.
The newly
released waiting times for 2012/13 showed the situation in accident
and
emergency departments was getting “worse and worse”, campaigners claimed.
Dr Cliff
Mann, president of the College of Emergency Medicine, said: “It’s not chaos in
emergency departments, but it is a crisis.” He claimed that this winter would
“probably be worse than last winter, which was the worst we have ever had”.
The College
of Emergency Medicine yesterday revealed more than half of
specialist
registrar posts in A&E have been left vacant over the past three
years, with
many doctors moving to other specialities or going abroad.
David
Cameron has demanded weekly updates on the situation in A&E units as the
government discussed plans to free up beds in private hospitals where necessary
to ease A&E overcrowding.
Of course, it’s not the exceptional waits like these that are
the problem. The waits of over 4 hours but under 12 are much more common and
pretty grim too. You can check those figures (for St. Peter’s) out on my
‘pages’ section under ‘waiting times crisis’
Neil Harris
(a don’t stop till you drop production)
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