LONDON (AP) — 1000’s of patients each week are being stranded for long stretches in ambulances outside overflowing British hospitals, a growing crisis that has likely contributed to scores of deaths, health care leaders said Thursday.
The U.K.’s ambulance service is seizing up in some areas because the country’s health system faces an inferno of pressures, including rising demand for care after pandemic restrictions were eased; a surge in flu and other winter viruses after two lockdown years; and staff shortages from pandemic burnout and a post-Brexit drought of European staff in Britain. 1000’s of hospital beds are also occupied by people who find themselves fit to be discharged but have nowhere to go due to a dearth of places for long-term care.
Official statistics show that ambulances in lots of areas are stuck waiting outside hospital emergency departments, sometimes for hours, because there aren’t any beds for the patients. Figures published Thursday by the National Health Service showed 31% of patients arriving at hospitals in England by ambulance waited no less than half-hour to be handed over last week, and 15% waited greater than an hour.
Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told the BBC that greater than 200 individuals who died in England last week were affected by “problems with urgent and emergency care.”
Stephen Powis, the NHS national medical director for England, said the state-funded health service “is facing an ideal storm, with winter virus cases rapidly increasing alongside ongoing pressures in emergency care and hugely constrained bed capability.” He said the NHS has arrange a series of “war rooms” across the country aimed toward marshalling data and sending ambulances to less-busy hospitals to scale back waiting times.
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Strikes are about to place much more pressure on the system. Ambulance staff in three separate unions have voted to stage strikes in December, a part of a wave of motion by staff in lots of sectors demanding pay raises to match record inflation. Nurses have also voted to go on strike for 2 days this month in areas covering about half of England.
“It’s carnage in the meanwhile — the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said George Dusher, a paramedic in northern England who voted to strike. “Individuals are ringing for an ambulance and are then stuck waiting on the ground for 10 hours because we are able to’t get to them. We’re not attending to cardiac arrests quickly enough due to delays.
“I used to see as much as 10 patients during a shift, now it’s just three or 4 due to the delays in hospital admissions.”
The pressures have renewed a long-running debate about methods to fund and run Britain’s National Health Service, arrange in 1948 to offer free care to all, funded through taxation. As in other industrialized countries, longer life expectancies and an aging population have increased demand on the widely beloved but continuously overstretched service.
The NHS also has long been a political hot potato. Opposition politicians accuse the Conservative Party, in power since 2010, of consistently underfunding the health service or in search of to denationalise it by stealth.
The federal government says funding continues to rise in real terms. It says public sector staff are being offered pay increases but that it could actually’t afford to provide out raises to match inflation, which hit 11.1% in October.
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