UK: Daily ER deaths due to lack of proper care, doctors alarmed

The numbers cited by some medical organizations are frightening. Some of them warned Monday of a crisis hitting emergency services in the United Kingdom, where they say many patients are dying due to lack of proper care or timeliness, urging the government to respond to growing social discontent. Britain’s public and free health service, the NHS, has been plagued by austerity for more than a decade and then by a pandemic that completely drained it.

This crisis, which regularly makes headlines in the British media, flared up again on Sunday when an organization representing ambulance workers, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, estimated that 300 to 500 patients would die every week due to deficiencies in care. including endless waiting.

Hospital officials downplay the veracity of these figures, but the vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine defended the estimate on Monday on the BBC and dismissed the temporary hardship hypothesis: “If you work in the field, you know it’s a long-term problem, not only short-term,” Ian Higginson insisted.

“Patients die in vain because of this choice

Last week, one in five patients treated by ambulance in England took more than an hour to get to the emergency room. And tens of thousands of patients had to wait more than twelve hours before being treated in the emergency room.

The government is questioning the current situation with the effects of Covid-19 and winter epidemics such as the flu and says it wants to do more for the hospital, but it recently launched a very strict budget austerity policy. As such, he is turning down requests for raises requested by the nurses, who, after their first strike in December, while inflation topped 10% for several months.

The British Medical Association, a federation of carers, joined in on Monday’s alarmist statements. “It’s not true that the country doesn’t have the funds to fix this mess,” President Phil Banfield denounced her in a press release. “This is a political choice, and because of this choice, patients die unnecessarily,” he added. He called the current situation “unsustainable” and called for “immediate” action from the government. In his welcome speech, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak named the NHS as one of his priorities and assured that his government was taking “strong” measures to close the gap in the healthcare system.