Blood and Soil Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon’s incompetence sees A&E patients forced to wait for hours in secret holding areas, serious ill Scots left in corridors in vain hope a medic will come quickly, ‘SNP women will get things done’, the sickest joke in Scottish politics

Dear All

My friend’s auntie died last week, prior to dying, she was rushed to the 842million Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. My friend who was her ‘carer’ was shocked at what he saw at the hospital.

The 842million Queen Elizabeth University Hospital A&E cannot cope, patients like my friend’s elderly aunt are effectively ‘stacked up’ to wait for treatment. The movement to bring three hospitals together was rushed through and this caused chaos at the start and it is still chaos now!

In December 2014, I visited the A&E because I had become seriously ill, far from being treated; I was kicked out as a ‘timewaster’ and didn’t get a physically examined by either the triage nurse or the doctor. The doctor told me that A&E was for genuine patients who had heart attacks or had their leg blown off as way of telling me I had no right to be there.

55 hours later, I was emergency admitted to the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.

Why did they decide to treat me?

I had a letter from my GP which laid out how serious my medical condition actually was, once I handed in the letter to A&E, within 10 minutes I was rushed into the treatment area ahead of others in a crowded waiting area.

I was within hours of dying or maybe even minutes. I didn’t know what they planned to do to me, I was expecting something minor, maybe a magic pill but to my surprise, they said to me, ‘you are not going anywhere’. The next 5 days, the Hospital fought to stabilise me, my kidneys among other things were shutting down, and blood was pouring out of the tubes stuck inside me by the medics. It has to be said, I was extremely lucky because my GP within less than 30 seconds, and being told the exact same information diagnosed correctly.

Many seriously ill people like me were sent away from the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, only to return as the service was overwhelmed during that Christmas period. The ‘blame’ for the situation according to Nicola Sturgeon’s pal, Shona Robison, the Health Minister was laid at the door of sick people for being sick.

We keep getting told that the chaos has been brought under control, but that isn’t true, people are still waiting ridiculously long times to get seen and treated down at the Hospital. It now transpires that A&E patients have been forced to wait for hours in secret holding areas. This is possibly to ‘fiddle’ the stats and hid the problems, to save the SNP Government from embarrassment and give the impression of competence. Urgent cases referred to hospital by GPs are kept separate from Accident and Emergency submissions.

So, what is the human cost of Nicola Sturgeon’s failure to deliver a health service fit for purpose and designed for the 21st Century?

Death!

The man died in Glasgow's £842million Queen Elizabeth University Hospital last year after he was abandoned on a hospital trolley in the Immediate Assessment Unit. It seems that Nicola Sturgeon isn’t to keen to talk about the human cost of her failures, or the fact that the reality is the SNP are not a competent Government, as I said before, they are a party of protest.

The Scottish Labour party has taken up the issue of the continual failure of meeting waiting times targets, month in and month out, the record is one of failure. The SNP pledged to have a transparent NHS, but after using a Freedom of Information request, Dr. Richard Simpson discovered different waiting times targets across the country.

Dr Simpson said:

“Our NHS staff performs miracles each and every day and deserve the best possible support and resources to do their job”.

As someone who was an inpatient on a ward, I saw how hard the nursing staff and auxiliary Nurses work, very fast, very hard, and ‘non stop’! There is always another job to do, and another and another, being bedridden, I had a front row seat for 5 days watching them work; there are not enough Nurses and auxiliary Nurses on wards.

Simposon added:

“Instead, in Scotland today, we have hidden A&E waiting lists. These are wards filled with patients who a doctor has judged sick enough to go to hospital; these patients face a postcode lottery in terms of the care they will receive. There isn’t a consistent name or a consistent waiting time target in any of these wards. It cannot be right that the length of time a patient waits for treatment is measured if they go through one door in a hospital but not another. SNP Health Minister Shona Robison promised a transparent and accountable NHS – why is she presiding over a system of hidden A&E waiting lists? After nearly a decade in power and a majority in the Scottish Parliament the SNP have no excuses here.”

There are as Dr Simpson says no excuses, but the Health Sec was treated as an afterthought as the SNP, in this case, Nicola Sturgeon ran off to chase independence, what she should have been doing is dealing with problems. Awhile I blogged, ‘Your granny is going to have to die’, this was because of what happened to my friend’s auntie were it seems some medics have to be ‘pushed’ to give treatment by people’s relatives.

When did the health service gets so callous regarding whether someone ‘deserves’ to be saved?

Is medicine an exact science?

The fact that hospital casualty departments have regularly failed to meet waiting time targets is a running sore in the SNP Government, it’s everyone’s fault bar them it seems. Recently SNP MSP talked about ‘getting rid of hospitals’ and inferred that treatment could be in the community. Of course, he was roundly condemned and laughed at on social media, anyone got a kitchen table so that a district nurse can do open heart surgery? What about a spare back bedroom to do radiation therapy for cancer, or a ‘secured living room’ for the criminally insane, we could do away with Carstairs.

The Patients Association speaking rather plainly said public had the ‘right to know’ when waiting time figures were being artificially manipulated. Of course some people may conclude that artificially manipulated figures are a form of dishonesty to hoodwink the public.

Chief Executive Katherine Murphy said:

“This is the kind of practice people need to know about”.

One wonders what Nicola Sturgeon think of people speaking out about this type of shifty deceit, the ‘little people’ demanding fair and transparent government; that will really stick in her craw.

Murphy added:

“There appears to be no transparency. Every patient should have the same, equal access to services but now we have a system where emergency patients go to casualty but those referred to hospital by their doctors go to different units and nobody really knows how long they’ll have to wait to be seen. Where is the equality in that? With no target times or vastly differing target times it is hardly an image of a transparent service. Our concern is that if these units take pressure off the actual casualty departments by lowering their waiting times, then we might be hitting targets artificially. Obviously we know of that one death in one of these units but we cannot be certain that is the only one.”

To show how the ‘secret units’ hide the truth about SNP incompetence, departments go by a variety of names including Clinical Decision Unit, GP Assessment Unit, Medical Assessment Unit, Acute Receiving Unit, Ambulatory Assessment Area and Acute Surgical Receiving Unit.

Many of them have no waiting time targets at all and all of them operate outside the four-hour waiting time target for A&E departments. The SNP Government made a big deal of publishing waiting times to great fanfare each week.

It was constantly said that Nicola Sturgeon was constantly in and out of hospitals as Health Sec, one wonders; what was she doing there if she wasn’t sorting problems like A&E?

One day, you, a member of your family or even a friend or neighbour will be rushed to A&E, will you or they suffer the same fate as the man who was ‘stacked’ on a trolley and left?

If you want to improve your survival chances, there is one measure worth considering, and that is to vote as many of the SNP out of public office in the forthcoming Holyrood election.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University