Top Tweets for #nhsfails

This really worries me A month ago in Wales I suffered a ruptured aneurysm in my abdomen. I lost over 2 units of blood But the Welsh ambulance service refused to send an ambulance. I was still breathing so apparently didn't need one I spent 7 hours lying on the ground in a car park. Every time I moved I threw up from the pain. The owners of the car park called 999 6x One of the people there was a fireman. He couldn't believe that 999 treated each call as a separate incident and couldn't see the details or link to previous calls. He was frustrated because they could see I was seriously ill but you can't see internal bleeding and so there was no way to persuade 999 that it actually was an emergency Eventually my husband arrived by taxi, journey of more than 3 hours from our home He gave me my pain meds (the car park people were worried about liability and I was too ill to get them myself). This meant I was able to crawl into the car and he drove me to A&E He got me into a wheelchair. We waited 75 minutes to see a doctor. I was shivering, heaped with blankets and threw up all over the floor As soon as a doctor looked at me I was taken straight to resus. The next day I was transfered by blue light ambulance to another hospital, had a blood transfusion and spent 5 days on the high dependency unit If my husband hadn't been able to come and look after me I have no idea how I would have survived. As it was I nearly didn't I would not have been able to get myself to hospital nor would I have been able to log into some digital triage system This scheme seems to assume if you're seriously ill you'll arrive by ambulance and if not you're well enough to navigate a digital portal My experience suggests that's a dangerous assumption A week later, back home in England I had another ruptured aneurysm. This time an ambulance came in 2 hours and again I was taken straight to resus It wasn't the same because I had a recent diagnosis of a ruptured aneurysm so we could tell 999 I was almost certainly bleeding internally. But I was too ill to get myself down the stairs and out to the car. We still needed that ambulance and I still wouldn't have been able to fiddle around with an ipad Proper triage REQUIRES an actual doctor to look at the patient. It takes a matter of minutes to differentiate between a life threatening emergency and not a life threatening emergency. That's not minutes to get a diagnosis but to know that the person is stable or not stable and if not that needs immediate attention Seriously ill people can't do it themselves. It doesn't matter how smart or articulate they are normally. Or how tough. Expecting people to manage their own emergency care isn't what a modern health service should do https://t.co/RMi7L44fUy