Hospital waiting lists

[saundra]

It must be a nightmare for people on a hospital list now
And in the future
Plus not being able to see a doctor
easily

[miasmum]

My mother in law was referred for a hip replacement in July 2019. She first saw her consultant in Feb 2020. He x-rayed her said she was a pretty severe case and listed her for surgery. In November 2020 he saw her again, apologised and x-rayed again. By now she is basically bone on bone. He said we really need to get you done, because your knee is suffering now, as you aren't walking properly, I am aiming for Easter. Re-did the x-rays, and in January 2021 she had a pre-op assessment. Last week I rang as her knee is now giving way, because she is putting so much pressure on it trying to take the weight off her hip. She is on his first list as he knows how urgent she is, he will be starting to operate in June. Two years almost since she was referred. She will now need a new knee as well, so thats going to cost the NHS even more, plus she now needs to go for another pre op assessment.

She is in pain, she admits she is and this is a woman that fell off the side of the stairs, smashed her ribs off her spine, fractured two vertebrae, punctured a lung and when admitting the paracetamol wasnt helping and maybe she should go to hospital, walked into A&E with the words, I fell down stairs and hurt my shoulder. The x-rays and then CT resulted in her being blue lighted to Coventry Trauma centre, and having her ribs rewired onto her spine. So if she says it hurts, it bloody hurts

[cromwell]

MM how awful.
As you say if a woman like that says it hurts, then it must.
I'm in a bit of a similar situation but compounded by the fact I let myself get overweight.
In 2018 I was diagnosed with severe arthritis of the left hip and moderate to severe arthritis of the right hip. Unfortunately I wasn't told about the amount of weight I had to lose before they would look at me. I was just referred for physio.
A year later when I went back to my GP in late 2019 is when I eventually found out. Despite me losing 50lb since then I'm still not on the waiting list. They won't put me on the list until I am the right BMI. So I have to get down to the weight, then they will graciously put me on the waiting list when I was wanting to be put on the list for a date in the future when I'm pretty sure I will be at the right weight.
As it is who knows how long the waiting list will be when I eventually get on it, after initially being referred in 2018?
And your mother is right, bone on bone bloody hurts.

[Workingman]

Saundra, I agree that 4.7 million is a staggeringly high number, but what does it mean?

The press release says; "A total of 4.7 million people were waiting for routine operations or procedures at the end of February 2021."

How many of them are waiting for emergency or essential treatments to mitigate or cure life threatening or debilitating illnesses, and how many are, like me, waiting for treatment to cure / ease a condition currently treated with pain killing drugs or other methods? We need more of a breakdown of the various conditions than the headlines are giving us.

Shell and Cromwell, the cases you mention are in my first group and definitely should be prioritised. I, on the other hand, can wait as I have done for the past two years, and there are ever so many like me. Let us not forget that the pandemic is skewing the figures somewhat and we should try not to kick the NHS over this.

[Suff]

How many of them are waiting for emergency or essential treatments to mitigate or cure life threatening or debilitating illnesses, and how many are, like me, waiting for treatment to cure / ease a condition currently treated with pain killing drugs or other methods? We need more of a breakdown of the various conditions than the headlines are giving us.

Back at the end of March 2020 my niece, diagnosed with extensive stomach cancer outside of the NHS by a private hospital in Glasgow, not by the NHS who had decided this cancer was a mental condition, was punted out of hospital with a morphine pain driver, having been refused palliative chaemo to get her life in order before she died; died in screaming agony at home and we are still trying to work out how to decrypt her data stores so we can get at a decade of book writing and music creation. It is not going well as she had passwords that will take the end of the galaxy, sever times over, on current hardware and decryption software.

As you can imagine, we're not impressed by the NHS performance.

[saundra]

That's awful for you all stuff
And we all during our life time trusted the NHS
Well we used to

[Suff]

Thanks Saundra.

That is even aside from the fact that two consultants and my GP refused to send me for an Angiogram, where they would have discovered my massively constricted coronary artery (less than 2mm). But, no, you don't ask them, they tell you. What they told me was "The MRI says you are not bad enough yet".

Granted I didn't die and my health is returning very quickly. But my trust in the NHS is Zero. My niece was just the icing on the cake, the heart attack was a given.

Many, many people have a very good experience with the NHS. Others no so much. They tried to send my father home when he had his second heart attack because "he wasn't bad enough". When they read his records and actually bothered to do the blood test, they found that, mild as it was, he had had a second heart attack and that they might actually have to do something. He spent 4 hours under angiogram having a massive stent fitted to ensure he didn't have a 3rd heart attack.

Had my father not known exactly what was going on, he would have simply been sent home. The consequences of which could have been that he was totally crippled.

The NHS is now what I call "health on a budget". If they can get away with not treating you they will.

Cromwell I heard about the BMI situation about 10 years ago. It was a tactic to reduce the budget. If people were not going to lose weight, then they were not going to treat them. Ditto smoking. Well smoking I get, BMI? It is, as I have said, Bollox. It only works for the median population, the rest are S.O.O.L. The idea, so they claimed, was that if they forced the population who were in danger to lose weight, then they would also reduce the number of operations. Yeah, right. Health on a budget!

Personally I'd do a FOI request and demand to know how many people, of a BMI over the figure they are quoting, are on the list above you cromwell. Scare them silly then threaten them with an ambulance chaser to get you the funds for private treatment. Should get their focus.

My father decided to go private for his knee because he didn't want to wait the 18 months (minimum), that they were quoting. Ditto he went private for his cataract operations as he would have been, essentially, blind, by the time they got around to it.

[Workingman]

This topic has become a bit too personally specific, and while I understand and appreciate the reason(s) for the input they have made it impossible to be able to comment objectively on the 4.7 million waiting list issue, so I am out.

[saundra]

But it does show how it is effecting people WM
And in months to come
At the end of the day it's how it's effecting people's lives and day to day health

[Workingman]

The headline figure does, Saundra, I absolutely agree.

It affects all of us, equally, and the pandemic has played its part - do not forget the pandemic.

It does not make the NHS crap or useless. It is one of the world's biggest healthcare providers and with institutions that large mistakes will be made. Those mistakes impact those individuals and that is more than unfortunate, and it is understandable that they and their loved ones are angry, but those lapses do not make the institution itself worthless to the rest of us.