December 12th 2022.
Well here we are, coming into Christmas and Britain is in a little bit of strife.
There is a rising of discontent throughout the country as more and more unions lobby for wage increases and then successfully ballot their members to vote for strike action.
This has been getting worse than earlier in the year when the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers’ union (RMT) started their strike action. They are now shutting down the rail network on the run in to Christmas, ruining the holidays for many people, who because of Covid restrictions have not spent Christmas visiting relatives for two years. Whilst many people supported the RMT’s strikes over the previous months, the act of striking over Christmas has been a major misstep and public opinion is now swinging strongly against the union. By closing the country over Christmas, they have given up the moral high ground and alienated their public support.
The Daily Telegraph has produced an Advent calendar, which displays the strike of the day as you open each window. There is not a blank day between December 1st and Christmas. Talking of Christmas, we have the usual silly season story, where staff at Brighton University (Ranked number 112 in the UK according to the Complete University Guide) have been instructed not to use the term Christmas as it is too Christian-centric but use winter closure period instead.
The latest list of strikers are nurses, ambulance workers, rail workers, Royal Mail staff, border agency staff, Heathrow baggage handlers, driving test examiners and National Highways workers. The Home Secretary has advised Britons not to go overseas for their holidays as they may suffer severe delays at immigration on their return to the UK. It looks as though movement throughout the country will be more restricted than during last year’s lockdown. The Government are looking at covering some of the health workers’ and ambulance drivers’ duties by calling in the military. They are also looking at deploying the military to cover Border Agency duties.
If we look further at the striking workers, without exception they are all employed in the public sector. It raises suspicions that there is a concerted effort behind these strikes and there have been whispers within some of the unions that they want to bring down the Conservative Government. Some of the wage demands are so unrealistic that it makes one wonder at the motivation behind the strikes – for example, nurses are demanding a 19% increase in pay, to which no government could agree.
After backing the medical staff during Covid and raising the NHS to the level of a Deity the public is becoming disenchanted with the service from the NHS.
Cornwall is experiencing some of the worst ambulance delays in England as heart attack victims are left waiting one hour and 40 minutes on average for an ambulance. Heart attacks and strokes are category two responses and Cornwall’s response times have deteriorated over the last two years. In 2019/20 the average wait time was 32 minutes. The NHS target is 18 minutes.
Mary Kinsella, 72, fell in Albion Road, Helston on a Tuesday afternoon.
An ambulance was requested at 1.35 pm but didn’t arrive until 10.30 pm. Mary’s family repeatedly called the ambulance service but were told there simply was not one available. When our story was published 24 hours after the fall, Mary remained in an ambulance sat outside Treliske (Royal Cornwall Hospital) as there were no beds available.
Emma Hardy tells how it took 13 hours for an ambulance to arrive for her grandmother, who fell and broke her hip on the apron at Newquay airport. Once she was taken to Treliske Hospital, she was compelled to wait in a succession of ambulances for a further 21 hours. Emma’s grandmother Brenda Hardy, 83, who lives close to the airport. As they were about to board the plane, Brenda fainted and collapsed on the apron.
Emma said: “I can’t fault Newquay Airport as their first responders were on the scene straight away, but they didn’t want to move her as her hip was hurting. We phoned for an ambulance at 4pm and by 5.40pm she was still lying on the tarmac – she had blankets over her, but we couldn’t get anything under her to make her more comfortable, and she was getting much colder. We were told she had been upgraded to Priority 1, which should mean an ambulance would get to her in 18 minutes.”
The airport’s firemen stretchered Brenda into the executive lounge at 6pm as it was decided it would do her more harm than good being left on the runway. An ambulance finally arrived at 4.50am, 13 hours after the initial call.
When Brenda reached Treliske she waited for a further 21 hours, having to move ambulances four times, before she got a bed. She was released from the hospital on her 84th birthday 6 days later after receiving an emergency hip replacement. The airport is the base for Cornwall’s medical Helicopter service, but they weren’t allowed to get involved. Treliske would have been a 10-minute hop.
In a serious development, a Coroner has written to the Health Secretary with his concerns about the crisis in the social care sector leading to hospital bed-blocking and delays in ambulances reaching patients.
Andrew Cox, senior coroner for Cornwall, cited the cases of three people in the county where delays in ambulances reaching them had caused or contributed to their deaths.
Mr Cox has written a preventing future deaths report to the Health Secretary Steve Barclay, with his concerns.
“All of the cases listed experienced long delays in ambulance attendance and/or long delays in admission into the only acute hospital in the coroner area, Royal Cornwall Hospital,” Mr Cox wrote. He went on to say that these cases were only a selection and that a number of inquests similar in nature were still to be heard.
The Coroner said the Royal Cornwall Hospital’s medical director had told him there had been at times the equivalent of five wards of patients fit for discharge, but they could not leave due to problems with the social care sector.
The report gives the Department of Health and Social Care until January 10 to respond to the coroner’s concerns.
Finally, an interesting case concerns a chest pain patient. They were referred by their GP to the Rapid Access Chest Pain Clinic (RACPC). If the patient complains of chest pains the GP carries out an initial triage, if they feel that it merits further investigation, they carry out an ECG and take blood tests. They then refer the patient to the RACPC which target an assessment within two weeks of referral as shown on their official website. In this case, the patient had their RACPC consultation nine weeks after referral. In the meantime, they complained to the patient support body. The clinic apologised for the delay and said that they had fixed the problem of the two weeks wait stretching to 9 weeks. In typical NHS fashion, they pointed out that they had now changed the website to show an expected waiting time of nine weeks. So much for rapid access.
Oh yes, the result of the video consultation was that the patient needed an urgent angiogram and possibly angioplasty with the insertion of a stent. They were put on the fast track for this and given an appointment for the procedure in March 2024.
There is a feeling of apathy in the UK and the thought that nothing seems to work anymore. The government fluffs around at the edges of issues and seems unable to get a grip on the problems and actually do something about them.