Poor Child.



Hospitals need to bring back old fashioned Matrons to kick some ass and knock certain people into line.  And I am not talking about Nurses and Doctors.



What happens when:

Hospitals cut back on staff and beds when demand is increasing?

What happens when wards are full of patients who cannot be discharged for social reasons thus slowing down the flow through A&E?

What happens when drug seekers/ addicts and people with minor illnesses are overwhelming A&E's and demanding urgent attention?

What happens when Nurses and Doctors cannot even triage and assess really sick patients properly because of out of control drunks smashing the place up (a constant thing in A&E) and patients arriving with chronic back pain harassing the staff and making ridiculous demand after ridiculous demand? 

What happens when a family brings great grandma into A&E for abdo pain and by the time they complete all of her tests it is 0200 AM.  The tests show that she is fine and can go home.  Just has wind. There are no beds in the hospital anyway and A&E is backed up with critically ill people waiting to be seen.   But all this family can do is piss and moan about how unfair it is to send their medically stable  and precious grandma home at 2AM and they demand she stays the night in the A&E cubicle.  Then granny makes demand after demand overnight, expecting to be waited on because she is elderly thus stopping the staff from assessing, triaging, and dealing with the potentially critically ill people. 


It is an accident and emergency department for christ sakes!! It is not a place for you to go because you ran out of pain meds for your bad knee or you feel nauseous and your GP is closed. ARGHHHHH. 

It is not a place for your elderly relative to get babysat because she is too precious to have to deal with being discharged and driven home at 2AM and you really don't want to deal with her anyway. 

It is not a place to go for a pregnancy test and then scream the place down because you are not getting seen to first (duh, the damn things are £5.99 at Boots).

 It is not a place for you to go for a morphine fix and stab yourself in the finger and drip the blood in your urine so that we think you have kidney stones.  It is not the place to go because you have been constipated for 2 days.  It is not a place to go because you are mad at your GP for not giving you antibiotics for your viral cold.   It is not a place to throw a temper tantrum because things are not going your way.  It is not the place you should go to demand junk food and snacks from a Nurse that is running around trying to hang blood and implement docs orders for the critically ill.  Especially if you walked yourself into the place.

Oh yes we are SO sorry that the patient with chest pain and shortness of breath was taken in first despite the fact that he came in after you and your sore thumb.  Eye roll.


ER's and A&E's are so overwhelmed with this kind of SHIT that they cannot function.  When the hell are we going to get over this "customer service" crap and start being strict hospitals again where matrons demand that the patients and visitors compose themselves and follow some rules?  If you are not as sick as the others you are not first priority!  Let me tell you what happens when the public abuses the ER's of the United States and the A&E's of the UK.

This happens. 

Important things get missed.  Really sick people wait to long.  The quiet patients who complain the least are usually sicker than the fat twat who walked himself into A&E with a "stomach ache"  demanding a chocolate bar and some Pepsi..
Poor little thing.  It was an extremely rare illness that strikes quickly and is easily missed with all the coughs, colds and flu out there. But I would think that if she had urgent attention she might have been luckier.  Why didn't a sick child like her get immediate attention?  Because of Emergency room abusers.  This dying little girls father had to fight his way past hordes of drunks and ER abusers to get his kid seen. He was right to shout loudly. Had he not done, the staff never would have heard him over the tantrums and moaning of the people who merely have minor illness and the rowdy drunks trashing the place and beating up on staff.



Five hours she waited.  Five hours of the Nurses and doctors dealing with drunks, and people with minor illnesses who think they are entitled to be seen first and then scream the place down.

If you have ever worked in A&E, you'll know what I mean.  If you haven't worked in A&E you will probably not have a clue...