Distressed elderly woman died alone in A&E corridor at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd, visitor says
www.bbc.co.uk
A woman visiting the hospital with her partner says she saw the patient in her final moments and alerted staff.
  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    12·
    8 days ago

    This is tragic, I know its UK but the same thing happens in Canada. I work inpatient but we’ve had our share of Emerg deaths (equivalent of A&E).

    Where I work there are problems with the amount of patients seeking care, short staffing (its hard to get people to come in even for OT because its short staffed and who wants to work if its short staffed 😬), and upstream of emerg we get patients with no clear path to discharge. I do trauma in a level 1 trauma centre - doesnt matter what that means exactly but take it to mean that we get people from all over the province I live in as transfers. Even there we had a handful of 30+ day stays, a couple 100+ day stays. There’s nowhere for them to go, so we can’t get people moved up from emerg, so trauma cases are down there in emerg waiting for a trauma bed we don’t have. We’ve also started opening beds for neuro ICU cases (we shouldn’t be, “but we need beds and you guys are good enough”) which was always a hard no because… neuro ICU has people stuck in flow because theres nowhere to discharge them for rehab/long term care. We also take on nominally outpatient ortho cases (“you guys are surg arent you? You can take it”) who end up waiting for surgery for 5+ days to fix a tib-fib or whatever.

    We also have issues with people using emerg as primary care. I am completely empathetic about needing that on the patient side, but it does mean 10+ hour waits for anyone under CTAS 2 and even CTAS 2 sometimes 😬. I never had a doctor before 2020, I would just use walk ins. That stopped being a thing in 2020. Family GPs have overfull panels, and some communities - essentially anywhere outside urban centres - there are NO family GPs. So no one has primary care, emerg has no flow, long term care and rehab have increasingly complex patients and nowhere to discharge to, inpatient has nowhere to discharge to, theres not enough staffing anywhere, and provincial governments have done stuff like building arenas and stadiums over new hospitals for decades and decades.

    Or here’s another thing, oncology has had amazing advancements in biologics. But they were coming out during covid so approval and getting them onto formularies was put aside while people did warp speed on vaccines and covid antivirals. So people had to get compassionate access for these biologics - or pay out of pocket but these things are like $100K a minibag and we had to backflush and drain it twice lol - which meant chair time. When compassionate access wasnt available people were told to go to private infusion clinics, but private clinics run where profits are so in the big cities and not rural access. So people were dying of cancers when we had the biologics available and still are, because we dont have chair time as a system (also because these are working way better than anticipated, five year survival rates are up, more people are living than expected so we are also running out of chair time because of the number of people not dying). We could have more chair time in rural and undeserved areas with: capital investments in clinics and adequate staffing and education. But, again, stadiums and arenas are where collectively we put money.

    Its frustrating watching it from inside and advocating for no change to happen and deadly from outside the system.