When will this government take proper responsibility towards NHS patients? Now? Soon? Ever?

Call To Action

“At what point do the politicians accept that they are asking too much of the workforce? At what point do they start to take responsibility for the people dying in overcrowded A&E departments? At what point do they see the patients lying on trolleys in corridors as their problem, because they are in charge, and it is their responsibility to safeguard the well-being of the public?”

I started working as an NHS doctor in 2010, and back then people were generally pretty happy with how the service was running. The waiting lists were quite low, most people could get an appointment with their GP easily, and A&E departments weren’t under the pressure they are today. In fact, when I worked in A&E in 2012 it was a big deal if a patient was in the department for longer than 4 hours without being admitted to a hospital ward or sent home.

Computer screens in the emergency department had a list of patients and a time tracker which classed them as “green”, “amber” or “red” depending on how long they’d been waiting. If your patient went red, the nurse in charge would start asking questions, and a senior doctor would often be dispatched to help you to send the patient home or ensure their admission. If you failed to hit the 4 hour target, you’d be spoken to by a senior. We all got close to the 4 hour limit from time-to-time; sometimes because we were juggling lots of things at once, sometimes when we just weren’t moving quickly enough. On one occasion I remember sending blood tests to the lab and the lab experiencing a delay, which meant I was waiting for ages to get a result back. Times like that felt stressful; you’d be refreshing the computer screen hoping for a result, watching that timer tick down. It had been drilled into us from day one that the 4 hour target mattered - that we were responsible, and we all took that very seriously. And the reasons these targets mattered? People waiting too long suffer more; it’s unpleasant, it can be harmful, and it can impact on the general “flow” within the hospital, creating a knock-on effect to every other patient who came before and who would come afterwards. Every minute mattered.

The only time I ever saw a senior doctor disregard the 4 hour target was during a night shift when we were looking after two extremely unwell patients in the resuscitation bay. One required a huge amount of attention from various teams, the other required an emergency transfer to a specialist neurological hospital. I remember the nurse in charge flagging up the patients turning red on the screen as they approached the 4 hour mark, and the senior doctor said “I am going to deliver care to the sickest patients in this department who might lose their lives tonight, and everyone else is going to have to wait”. I don’t think I’d ever been more impressed by a doctor (and that doctor is now my husband)..