Two months ago I helped with the care of an elderly gentleman who had collapsed in the station car-park. He had a nasty cut on his head that we managed to control with a dressing. He was confused and needed to be seen in hospital. An ambulance, called on 999, would not come "for at least two hours". Two hours, for an ambulance for a man who had fallen and hit his head. After 30 minutes his daughter, who happened to be a nurse, arrived and drove him to A&E. I found out yesterday that he died two days after the incident due to a bleed on the brain that was not detected or treated.
Any society that cannot properly fund an ambulance service nor treat those in need in A&E in one of the richest countries in the world is a disgrace. If you vote Tory you will be enabling more of the same. People will continue to die.
I did two things for the first time in my life on a Saturday night a month ago, the first thing being to dial 111 in the hope of getting to see a doctor, or at the very least to speak to one, then, having been informed that there was no prospect of either of those alternatives, the person on the end of the phone decided that I needed to be taken in an ambulance to hospital, 25 miles away, and she offered to arrange this for me. This was at 10.15 p.m. At 12.45, I rang 999 myself to be told I was 'on the system' but they were very busy and would call me just prior to attending to me. At 2 a.m. I rang again, to have the same mantra repeated, so rang 111 again to say that, on balance, I felt better off crawling up to bed and hope that I felt considerably better in the morning. The 111 person (different to the one I first spoke to) advised against this, at least without a doctor's say-so, and could I hold on while she raised one? After five minutes, she came back to say there wasn't one available, so I asked her to unarrange the ambulance. She was reluctant ('on your own head be it') but I insisted.Luckily for me, my hernia didn't in the event prove to be strangulated, it was a combination of my M.S. and the hernia causing me agony, but it had abated by the morning, despite no sleep, and wasn't life threatening. I'm over 70 and, for most of my life, have scarcely bothered the NHS, but in the last twelve months my body has gradually taken it upon itself to cease to function in many regards, and I hate to cause a fuss, put myself to the front of the queue, or the other cliches (I'd much rather do this on behalf of others) but. I'm afraid, the NHS is falling apart despite the (mostly) marvellous, overworked, underpaid staff, because each part works independently of the others and co-ordination is not part of the scheme of things. On BBC News last week, Boris Johnson was shown sitting in a circle with a group of staff at West Cornwall Hospital, trying to convince his very unamused, cynical-looking audience of his grandiose plans for the NHS. The nurse sitting next to him and expressing scepticism, asking a question he couldn't answer, was one I'd spent ninety minutes with the previous day in the Urgent Care Centre and who I got along well with, and we both discussed some personal details of our life. She was not only extremely caring and professional but a thoroughly nice person, struggling financially, and it sickened me to see Johnson giving her some patronising guff just because we live in a top marginal seat.