The NHS has struggled for several years as waiting lists grow along with record vacancies and missed targets for emergency rooms, ambulance transfers and 999 calls.
Now, a senior health expert claims that up to 500 people die every week due to delays and problems getting emergency and emergency care. Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), urged the government to “pull themselves together” before things get worse.
Although ambulance arrival times and vacancies are published regularly, the exact number of deaths due to serious health problems cannot be determined.
First, the death certificates do not list “ambulance delay” as a cause, although that could very well be the root cause – for example, when it happened last year. I it turned out that Dr. Kailash Chand waited 33 minutes for paramedics to arrive at his home after cardiac arrest when it was already too late. His family believed he could have been saved if the 999 response time had been within the NHS’s seven-minute limit for category 1 life-threatening calls.
However, aid workers perhaps best understand the tragic consequences of the growing problems in the NHS. An estimate of 300 to 500 deaths per week related to being late to the emergency room is based on official inflated death rates, which for England ranged from about 1,700 per week in mid-October to about 900 in mid-November. The RCEM believes that between a quarter and a third of these “extra” deaths are likely due to problems in the emergency department.
They are also “not short-term,” as RCEM Vice President Ian Higginson pointed out on Monday morning. He criticized any attempt to “discredit” his organization’s earlier warnings of serious problems in hospitals, blaming the pandemic for it.
“Over the past few days, we have heard that all the current problems are related to Covid, or all because of the flu, or it is difficult, you should not jump to conclusions – all that. said Dr. Higginson.
“If you are on the front lines, then you know that this is a long-standing problem. It’s not for the short term. Something similar happens every winter and it still seems like a surprise to the NHS.
Excess deaths in the UK this fall are nearly the same as they were during the same period last year, and doctors are becoming increasingly frustrated with the inability of successive governments to address long-standing problems, as recent days have once again shown.
More than a dozen NHS trusts and emergency services reported critical incidents over the holiday period. Last week, one in five ER patients in England waited over an hour to be handed over to the ambulance crew. NHS Trusts aims to have 95% of ambulance transfers completed within 30 minutes and 100% within 60 minutes.
In November, 37,837 patients waited more than 12 hours in the emergency room for a decision to be admitted, according to NHS England. This is almost 355 percent more than in November last year, when there were 10,646 of them.
Mr Higginson said the RCEM data on delay deaths was more than a “guess”.
“We have really good evidence, accumulated over decades, that long waiting times in emergency rooms are associated with poor patient outcomes,” he said.
“These are real numbers, and I fear that we will hear attempts to distort, manipulate and discredit these data. I think when we hear that we should say “no” – this is promotion. This is a real problem. It’s happening in our emergency room right now.”
Source: I News
I’m Raymond Molina, a professional writer and journalist with over 5 years of experience in the media industry. I currently work for 24 News Reporters, where I write for the health section of their news website. In my role, I am responsible for researching and writing stories on current health trends and issues. My articles are often seen as thought-provoking pieces that provide valuable insight into the state of society’s wellbeing.