Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets.
Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour pledge.
The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 999 calls.
Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show that last year 43,576 patients waited longer than one hour before being let into emergency units.
Only seven out of 11 ambulance trusts responded to the survey, so the true figure could be far higher.
A British twist on the Canadian model, where the official “wait time” for surgery doesn’t begin counting down until after the patient has seen a specialist – a period that can extend into months.
I know a Canadian who has been waiting 3 1/2 years to see a specialist. The wait-time was supposed to be only 12 months.
Saw this on Glen Beck last night.
This is socialist medi-care, save the system by sacraficing the patients.
Works in a similar manner here in Canada.
It’s not the lives of the patients that are important to save it is the system itself that must be saved regaurdless of the cost in lives lost.
Socialism means never having to admit you were wrong even when it is evident to all and killing your citizens.
Social healthcare fits perfectly with the Canadian psyche: To be bland and mediocre means not being AMERICAN…You know those evil cousins of ours that are generally more prosperous, have warmer weather and still are the #1 destination of choice for migrants worldwide.
We are all just chemicals anyway, so who cares? Life is merde. Besides, they are English.
Us French, we don’t mind long wait times, good reason not to work so we can smoke gauloise, suck some brie and plan a vacation to Cuba.
ambulances stack up at the Calgary Rockyview a dozen at a time for days. The rule is they cant leave until the patient is seen to.
Tell me about it, eh?
The system failed my father, who passed away last year. They took months to get around to diagnosing his cancer. Fortunately for him, he passed suddenly of cardiac arrest just days before the results were available, indicating it was final-stage.
The system moves too slowly to save lives a lot of the time.
And I was also dissatisfied with the care he received for the final week of his life between his first and final cardiac arrests. They appeared to be clueless about a lot, negligent, even, about checking his medical file, which is a basic thing, really. It was shocking, really, when I actually began to think about it.
I can say, from my own observation over the years taking my dad to the hospital so many times I lost count, that the Canadian “health care” system doesn’t operate so much in the interests of Canadians in need of it as it does simply perpetuating its ideological survival as purely-socialist and political.
There’s not all that much “care” in the system, unfortunately.
We definitely need a parallel public-private system with freedom of choice. We do have the “right to choose” to SAVE at least our own lives, too, don’t we?
In the land of bad teeth, body odor and denial, I am not surprised at the line-ups at medical centers.
When you live on bangers and eggs, fish and chips and tons of chocolate and warm dark beer, you can expect to be sick a lot.
Britain is going down faster than a thousand dollar hooker. The idiots who run that country have sold it out to Islam. I don’t know how much they will have to swallow before they gag on their own stupidity and do something, but my guess they will go the route of the crack whore and die of their ultra left habits.
One can only hope we learn from their grievous errors.
Political correctness and multiculturalism are toxic to any society as is Islam.
Jobs are priority one within the present system, dying is secondary.
Block funding of hospitals has to end.
Hospitals must be placed in a competition mode seeking more patients rather than rationing in order to stay within a budget assigned ( as is the current method), also the strangle hold unions have on the health care industry has to be minimized before anything will change.
Pretty damned obvious , I should think!
My sister in Germany had to be rescued as she was being starved to death by the German public health system. She had terminal ovarian cancer so the state decided to help her die, rather than foot the bill to extend her life. She was being fed sugar water introveneously while rapidly dwindling away. Then she was brought to the U.S., recovered her weight loss and reclaimed several more months of her precious life.
A decade ago, the U.S. health care industry was saved from being nationalized by HillaryCare. Now it appears the democrat candidates are fighting to see who will nationalize it first, and a democrat will certainly be elected President. Undoubtedly we are headed straight for the Canadian/European health care ‘paradise’ where we all will pay confiscatory taxes for sub-standard bureaucrat-run care, and anyone offering quality medical care outside the big gray machine will be imprisoned.
BTW, keep up the good work against kinsella, warman and the other censorship cheerleaders of the repulsive CHRC.
In the U.S. we are all closely watching this egregious attempt to crush the most fundamental of all human rights by the Orwellian-named Canadian Human Rights Commission, and its fascist big brother thugs.
4 hours! and waits over 1 hour! Poor babies! they should count their blessings. Here in Sodom-on-the-Ottawa a 4-hour wait is considered normal. Not to count all the patients coming from across the border where the waits are more like 6 hours, to add to the mess on the Ontario side.
My most recent experience is with a fall spill I took on the 11th of this month. I slipped in the woods next to my house while playing with the kids and fell down 5-6 feet my back landing on a rock or stump.
I crawled myself into the emergency room and despite promises, waited 3 hours before seeing a “Clerk”, whatever the hell that is. Clerk sent me for xrays. The doctor sat in the tent next to mine coddling with 4 teen girls who were giggling and laughing at even being there from the little fender bender they had but daddy insisted they go anyways. Next thing I know doctor sticks his head in the curtain, asks me if I want a perscription for some pain killers before I go. No metion of the xrays or what else could be causing the vicious pain I was in. Nothing. Really not being myself I decided to go home.
For four days I didn’t move from my bed. I then crawled to the local walk in clinic. The doctor there told me the pain killers I was perscribed where useless. He gave me better ones. Told me to see how it was on Monday.
Monday came and while I was much better with the pain killers when they wore off, it was back to square one. He then tested my water for blood which would indicate kidney damage but there was none. Grasping at what could be wrong, he asked me if they took xrays at the hospital. He then went online and looked at them. Sure enough, two broken vertebrae.
That was 3 days ago and thus far he has been unable to reach an on call orthopedic surgeon to get them to have a look at the xrays and or me.
While at the hospital I watched countless people under their own steam, waiting around, almost annoyed that they had to wait. Pacing, “tooting” and sighing. The problem is > 75% of what goes though an emergency room at the hospital doesn’t need to be there. Triage nurses need to be given rights to send these people on the way and go to their family doctor or walk in clinic where they should be. Until you show up at the ER with a note from a GP, with a limb hanging on sinue or requiring 2 orderlies to help you out of the car you should be refused entry. An ER nurse cousin of mine confirms my suspicions. They are powerless to suggest people take a hike and spend at least 75% of their time coddling “regulars” and hypochrondiac couples back to the ER for “date night”. I don’t think there is anything wrong with the hospital system beyond the need for it to grow a pair and send people not in dire straights on their way.
This is coming from someone that had to be coerced to go there by family after they dragged me out of the woods on a ladder with two broken vertebrae as it turns out.
I don’t know what the British are complaining about. We “discovered” the same thing going on at Royal Columbian just this month.
Read my lips: “waiting” is a form of rationing. Rationing is necessary in Public Health Care. In PHC the patient is a nuisance and an expense.
reminds me of when the kids were born.
both times during the delivery, the room was full of people, med students, family doctor, obstetrician, nurses, janitors, al quaida reporters……
who the hell are all these folks and why aren’t they doing their jobs, instead of f**kin the pooch!
The situation gunney 99 speaks of at Royal Columbian is the same at KGH in Kelowna, and at other hospitals throughout the Province.
The press saw the ER’s were overcrowded, so the admin had patients moved to other floors, which are now seriously overcrowded, but the optics are what’s important, not the patients.
But our government decided to give us a circus instead of improve health care, and we’re ever so grateful.
“I don’t know how much they will have to swallow before they gag on their own stupidity… ” : John West
I envy your ability to describe the situation in Britain today with lively metaphor and humour. Too bad about the inevitable end result, though.
Price is the only signal that permits a market mechanism to work.
In a price controlled, service rationed environ, there is no signal to expand or contract supply.
Combine this with two immutable truths: people are rational economic beings who operate in their own best interests, and, blind adherence to ideology kills people.
The puss-i-fication of Canada began as the victim culture expanded to include everyone being a victim of circumstance beyond their control. Whether apologizing to aggrieved persons for things that happened decades, or centuries ago, this action reinforces the notion that we are not personally responsible for our own selves.
Thus…’please government! make it better for me!’ expands into every corner of our lives, reducing choice, limiting personal growth, and denying the individual self determination in opting out.
Politicians get along with this perfectly well, because it is on their own self interest to have dependants, and expanding budgets. Little they do is aligned to improve the nation or its’ people – their actions are to build a new (dependant) constituency.
Because, at it’s bottom, a politician without a budget is nothing.
It ain’t the Cons, Libs, or Moonbats that will save and inspire a nation. It is its’ people. And ours have been fed the pablum for decades. We are doomed to mediocrity, and to remain an indecisive socialist backwater forever more.
Despite the platitudes and bull that comes from politicians, they’ll screw you in a heartbeat if it is in their self interest.
Give up hope. Canada is cooked. And as your aging, loved ones get substandard – even criminally negligent care – take comfort in your heart that the single payor will not change, except for those wealthy enough to make it happen.
Whether the Friends of CBC, the Friends of Medicare, and the countless leftists working diligently in the regional health boards, city halls, and school boards, these ghouls will ensure your freedom is diminished, your hopes dashed, and the system will tithe itself enough cash to stay viable, and maintain continuity. Because, these people have nowhere else to go, they are the tape worm within the animal.
Whether health, multi-culturalism, post secondary education, civil service, etc., we have paid the price for emulating the 19th century English post industrial revolution doctrine of the left. A communism cloaked in egality.
The ultimate price paid by a nation that did not seek and achieve a revolution. And we will forever pay for not declaring ourselves ‘free’. Think of that next time you pay fealty to a foreign monarch.
Sucker.
According to the cardiologist that treated me when I had my little ticker problem last month, the trick is to get sick on weekends.
I went into a nearly empty ER on a sunny Sunday afternoon. When I went back through it after the cathater to take a look at my heart (I do have one!!) on Tuesday the place was litterally standing room only.
According to the ER doc, that is very typical. After all, who wants to screw up the weekend.
An addendum: re the perception versus the reality, the public school boards act the same way as the hospitals. “Our schools are safe and working just fine. Look at the statistics.”
Well, yes, look at the statistics. The problem is that the bad stuff’s often shoved under the carpet. Board rubrics stipulate that certain misdemeanours must be reported and suspensions are to follow: this means the misdemeanours will be on the public record. But there’s a big out for administrators: if a student’s designated as Special Ed., as many miscreants are, the principal has discretion to waive the consequences and, therefore keep the problem under the radar. Isn’t that helpful?
So, it’s a sure thing that board statistics are bogus—manipulated for the optics.
hardbolied, I agree with you: unless some miracle turn around happens in this country of non adults, we’re cooked!
Important note, this is the National Health here. You can still get treated properly at a private hospital in Britain, you just have to pay money. Unlike Canada, where you have to leave the country to get treated properly.
Important distinction, eh?
4 hours ,you were lucky.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QsWd5QC7K5E
and things have improved in britain since 1948
Buricrats can be such a pain in my tail feathets and their a pain to everyone