Dear everyone,
In the UK, in most emergency departments, you can more or less to be seen and get treatment in about 4 hours. There may be some fudging of figures, you may be booked into a ‘treatment ward’ where you wait longer, but in general, round about the 4 hour mark.
This is pretty damn shiny. In most other countries you’d wait longer. In some cases quite a lot longer. Even when we’re snowed under, struggling to cope we’ll get 99% of people through in 4 hours…before the ‘4 hour standard’ came in, that didn’t happen. You could stay in A&E overnight on a nice hard trolley. When it was a new shiny government idea I went to A&E and spent a relaxing 12 hours waiting for my kidney infection (I’m assuming a pylonephritis) to be diagnosed and treated. I’ve friends in the US who’ve waited 8, 10, 12…and more hours for treatment.
And I know nurses who’ve worked in other countries who point out that at least once we know what’s wrong with you we do actually do something about it. We have exciting and expensive dressings, we have fun and new drugs, and we give them to you free, that is unless it’s a prescription to take home…
So. When you’ve been waiting an hour (or two, or hell, 3), and there’s 30 people who’ve just booked in, you have not been waiting ‘ages’. You might be bored, you might only need a quick bandage, but you’ll get treated in time order unless you’re haemorrhaging everywhere, and you damn well should be thankful that we treat you and get you out in 4 hours.
Don’t curse, don’t swear, don’t mutter about how useless the NHS is, shut-the-hell-up and understand how damn-lucky you are to have universal healthcare at a fraction the cost you’d pay if it weren’t NHS.
Yours, lacking in patience (but not patients) and pretending (at work) to be much nicer than she is feeling.
Me.
