18 July - Accident & Emergency
Quite often I read about proposals to end A&E services at Queen Mary’s
Hospital, Sidcup and to my shame, probably because I’ve rarely been there, and
never to A&E, I’m not sure I know exactly what is going on. I believe that the
proposals include shunting A&E patients to Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich,
and yes I can understand why people may not like that! Six months ago
exactly I briefly mentioned how I was taken by ambulance to Q.E.H., where
they filled me full of morphine and saline and told me I would have to be kept
there overnight. Then they threw me out five minutes before the Labour
government’s four hour admissions target leaving me to writhe in agony on their
waiting room floor without any treatment whatever.
Not unnaturally I complained and although they commented on various aspects of
my treatment they neatly omitted any mention of my principal complaint.
i.e. Targets before patient care. So I complained again and a mere four months later
they replied. Along the way my times at A&E have been falsified when I and
friends know exactly what my admission and throw out times times were. Other
lies have led to the hospital’s letters being contradictory so there is plenty of scope to
complain again. This time, because the contradictions have naturally led me to it,
there is a more specific question about why I received no treatment at all for the condition
diagnosed with the help of X-ray, beyond ever more powerful morphine shots. For anyone
interested in the performance of Q.E.H. A&E I have put
the correspondence
on site. But don’t bother going there unless you have half an hour to spare and an
interest in our health services. In another four months I may have another
installment to report.
Anyone still stuck with a dial-up connection may wish to know that the
correspondence page amounts to about a megabyte of data.