Jayne Dowle: NHS is on critical list as a winter storm looms ahead

All the evidence suggests that A&E departments are already over-stretched. And that’s before anyone burns their hand wrestling with the turkey. A growing number of emergency rooms are missing the target of seeing patients within the four-hour aim, according to data from the hospital regulator Monitor.

Don’t expect your GP surgery to do any better. Funding cuts are beginning to bite. I recently had to wait a full week for an appointment to see my doctor for advice on getting rid of a persistent cold. I’m not selfish. I understand that children, the vulnerable and the elderly should come first. It comes to something though when it takes seven days before a non-emergency situation can be dealt with. Meanwhile, I suffered and sweated and sneezed and wondered what I really pay my taxes for. And I know I am not alone.

What’s going to happen when Christmas kicks in? When those freak seasonal accidents happen in the home? When the flu bugs start spreading through party gatherings? When elderly people start slipping on the ice and breaking their fragile bones? When drunks fall out of taxis covered in cuts and bruises?

A recent report by the NHS Confederation paints an even gloomier picture than my 
own fevered imagination can conjure up.

It forecasts an increase in longer waiting times for patients, cancelled operations, and serious safety issues, including increased death rates, as the service buckles under the strain.

Senior managers expect hospitals to struggle at least as much as they did last winter, when waiting times were the worst for nine years.

This is despite the £500m rescue fund given to the A&E departments which have suffered the most problems in the past. I’m sorry, but the words “NHS finances” and “black hole” come to mind.

It doesn’t take another survey or report to highlight two areas of weakness: a lack of joined-up care and a kind of collective official denial that anything is wrong.

There’s a NHS radio campaign running at the moment which advises us not to bother our A&E departments with “minor” complaints such as sickness and aches and pains. If you see a woman talking to herself in the car at traffic lights, it will be me, telling the radio that it doesn’t know what it is talking about.

Okay, I agree that A&E departments should not be used as drop-in centres, but people are queuing out of the door because there is no choice. Either they can’t find a GP to take them on, they don’t understand the process or they find other sources of “advice” totally inadequate.

Given the terrifying failings in the out-of-hours service offered by the NHS over its telephone helpline, would you trust it with yourself – or with your sick child? I know I wouldn’t. And what an irony it is to be told to look on the internet to check our symptoms.

How many doctors complain about patients obsessing over their health, self-diagnosing apparently terminal illnesses with the help of nothing more than Google? And then we are expected to seek reassurance and medical advice for problems from the very same source? It’s an insult to the public, frankly.

Rather than preaching and patronising, the NHS should divert its time and effort into devising a more joined-up approach to emergency patients, admission, treatment, discharge and after-care.

It’s simple. If better access and follow-up was available at local level, there would be far fewer people lying on trollies in A&E waiting to be seen. There would also be far fewer people turning up with serious chest infections and incipient pneumonia because they couldn’t get a doctor’s appointment for a week.

Forgive me if I’ve got this wrong, but I thought that better all-round care was one of the main aims of the reforms undertaken by the coalition Government. Three years to sort it out, and it’s getting worse, not better. This is simply not acceptable.

It is said that a crisis brings out the best in people. Let’s hope that this remains so this winter.

Whatever comes to pass, those in charge should take heed and remember; a national health service is not just for Christmas, it’s for life. Literally.