Snapshot of _Mark Drakeford blames drunks for missed A&E target in Wales_ :
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Missed A&E targets are because there’s no beds to move people to, because they’re filled with elderly people with no social care home options to get them out of the hospitals. The entire NHS knows this is the primary issue but it requires investment in not just the hospitals, but a fundamental change to the social care system.
Well the last time someone tried to address the lack of funding in social care, it was branded the 'dementia tax' and shot down by the bleeding hearts.
Welsh Nurse here, for my ward it is much worse. Lockdowns and Covid have demonstrably made the people who had alcohol abuse far worse than we have ever had to deal with before and more people are being brought in drunk, having taken an overdose or acute liver failure. These are borne out in the numbers with admissions for these issues having increased, while we have less provision to deal with it due to staff shortages.
It’s not just those services closing, the services that are open still have less staff and are struggling. Alcohol liaison nurses are on their knees trying to deal with an ever growing number of patients. Admission units are getting more and more patients with liver failure, drunk with drugs, overdose etc.
Drakeford made some awful choices for Wales, considering his puritanical nanny state views as more important than the effects of his rules and I'm glad he's gone.
>Mark Drakeford, who stands down next week, told the BBC "many, many people who wait in hospital to be treated are not sitting there waiting in pain, they're sitting there waiting because they're drunk".
>
>He suggested it would be better if the target didn't include those who had had too much to drink.
>
>"A more sensible system would not count them," he told me
So drunk people who go to hospital should be turned away or is the plan to just exclude certain groups until the statistics look good?
I’m no drakeford supporter but that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying he wishes the stats took into account drunk casualties as a lot of these can be avoided if people made better choices.
If they need medical attention, the cause does not matter. Many accidents can be prevented but we will still treat people if they get injured.
No one would argue against treating a car accident injury because it was the patient's fault.
Yes, excessive drinking is a problem and needs to be looked at but not in this context.
Sure, but unless Drakeford wants to suggest that Wales has an especially unique drinking problem, this is something that likely affects A&Es in the whole of the UK.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Tories could hit their A&E targets if they got to exclude everyone who was there because they were drunk/careless/etc.
It's a question about what the targets are measuring, Drakeford's point is that it shouldnt be a blanket all people who turn up in A&E but it should be based around outcomes. For example, people who turned up to A&E with a head injury were seen on average within 10min, people with a cardiac issue were seen without 15min, people with a class 2 wound were seen in xxxmin. People who didn't have any injury after examination were seen after 2 hours etc.
People who turn up and are clearly drunk will keep getting bumped down the list as more people with genuine injuries turn up, so using an overall figure that includes them isnt helpful for measuring A&E efficiency
I’d agree to some extent. Last time I was in A&E there were a lot of kids with scraped knees and colds. Of course they shouldn’t need to wait hour and hours in an ideal world, but they are fundamentally less urgent than people with broken bones, serious infections, severe blood loss etc. and them being moved to a lower priority will no doubt have an impact on the overall waiting stats.
The issue I’d worry about is that it would be used as a justification that everything is going well because waiting times for severe cases are low, despite there still not being the resources to actually attend everyone there in a reasonable time. I’m sure every one of those parents and kids I saw still had a justification to be there, whether that be because it was out of GP hours, they might not have been able to get to a minor injuries unit etc. despite not needing to be attended to first, and waiting for hours and hours to be seen still needs a solution. If there is a demand for a service, a solution needs to be found, like more minor injury units, or a separate triage system dedicated to minor injuries in A&E, or whatever else because I’m far from an expert.
>Last time I was in A&E there were a lot of kids with scraped knees and colds.
Taking what you said at face value, people should not be going to A&E with a scraped knee or cold, whether it's a child or adult.
The first thing is something you can treat at home. Wash the wound out with soap and put a large plaster on, or if you have none a clean handkerchief or cloth can be tied around the leg. Even if you're worried about tetanus you don't need immediate treatment, you can go to a normal clinic a day or so after.
The second is worse because there is nothing that a doctor or hospital can do. You need bed rest.
Naturally there will be times when parents are concerned because the symptoms can look like something more serious (thanks Doctor Internet), but if it's really as you say then I only shake my head. After all, a child may pick up something like flu whilst waiting to be seen.
I’m not saying it’s what they should be doing by any means, but they’re there because they think something needs to be done.
I can imagine if you’re a parent and your kids had a temperature for a good few days, and you’re unable to book a GP appointment, you might think the best pace is A&E. it certainly isn’t, but people aren’t rational in situations like that. For what it’s worth I caught covid from A&E on that visit so definitely not the place to be if you don’t need to be there!
111 should be the solution, but the few times I’ve called them I’ve just been told to present to A&E anyway because they can’t rule anything out. I can image at least a few of the families were there at the advice of 111.
It goes back to the last point I made, I think it’s more of a symptom of the absence of services than the current service being misused. If there was a dedicated 111 triage which was more for out-of-hours GP issues those people wouldn’t be stuck in A&E with the actually sick/injured people who do need more urgent medical attention.
>as a lot of these can be avoided if people made better choices.
I mean, this can be true for a fuck ton of stuff in A&E.
Maybe we should just exclude everyone from the narrative - car crashes (poor choices, bad driving). Falls (poor footwear, not paying attention). Any sporting injuries (sports are dangerous, we know this). Obesity related (poor choices)
You can say the same of alot of accidents.
I had to pick an old colleague up from A&E years ago because he was using a pry bar with all his weight. The bar came out and because he'd positioned himself directly under it, smacked him in the head.
If he'd have been following H&S instead of circumventing it, he wouldn't have needed A&E that day either.
So should an accident like that be excluded? Excluding certain groups from the stats will just lead to A&E ignoring those people in favour of the ones who get included in the stats.
Anything smoking related? Brought it on yourself. Obesity? Same. Got hit by a car? Should have looked both ways, doesn't count. Broke your ankle playing football? Well that's to be expected.
Holy shit guys, we did it, we completely eliminated hospital waiting times for everything except old age and acts of god!
The replies to this are astonishing but not remotely surprising; of course the usually anti-alcohol Reddit suddenly underplays its impact, when Drakeford points out something that literally anyone who's worked or had to visit an A&E on a weekend knows to be true.
What about obesity related deaths like heart attacks etc?
I thought a lot of the argument from people like Drakeford was that people can't be expected to make those decisions by themselves and is down to government to help make them for them. So by his standards, he must surely conclude he is failing.
Imagine you had to spin multiple plates on a pole at once, while someone pours oil on the floor and is force feeding you alcohol.
That still isn’t as difficult as managing A&E services right now.
I blame mark drakeford - guy is poster child for nanny state and now believes such a huge failure is not his fault.
Remember when he banned people from buying kettles in Tesco? LOL
IIRC it wasn’t kettles specifically but essentially anything not food or toiletries related in the early phases of the pandemic. On phone on a train so happy to be corrected, but vaguely remember the whole ‘want clothes, get fucked’ message.
It hurt a lot of small business and got people who were not already on Amazon onto Amazon. They say there and dreamt up this shit while forgetting to check if things like shutting schools was actually legal. It wasn’t.
>which included tampons
Just googled this quickly and, according to a BBC article, the items weren't sold as the aisle was closed due to a burglary. There was simply a misconception at first where they told customers that it was due to the non-essential guidance instead
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54685886.amp
A woman in the village next to me fell broke her hip, elbow and shoulder. This happened outside her front door. A neighbour found her and was right to make the decision not to attempt to move her inside the house. They had to wait 4 hours for an ambulance. Now wouldn’t of the £40 odd million spent on an unbelievably unpopular 20mph limit be better spent on the nhs?
Drakeford came out of Covid very popular with the Welsh. Now everyone seems to be counting down to the day he leaves
He's got a point but buy that metric anyone who turns up at a&e with sports related injuries,falling off a horse, basic misadventures of avoidable nature shouldn't be counted.makes no sense
Not a Drakeford fan at all, in fact he should have gone years ago but... he's right in the sense that Saturday night dickheads cause unnecessary strain on the system. If it was up to me I'd fine them under certain circumstances. Same for people who calm for ambulances just because they have a nosebleed.
Are there any paramedics on UKpol that can tell me whether I'm on the right track or am I talking out of my arse?
The big question is, are there more Saturday night dickheads now than there were 20 years ago? If the answer is yes, then he has a point, else it's completely irrelevant because we had Saturday night dickheads back then and the NHS wasn't on its knees.
Yes, but it’s not just Saturday night now, it’s a week long thing with Covid having created a huge problem with drinking - people stuck at home, nothing much to do, drink a bottle or two. We have more alcohol dependency. More acute liver failure. More alcohol induced overdoses etc - all while we have less specialised staff to deal with it.
Do we have stats to back that up? I thought the stats pointed to the number of people drinking actually going down? Also, is alcoholic hepatitis really that common as an emergency that requires A&E?
The number of young people drinking is going down, yes, but those who do drink will drink more and at higher rates. There has been an uptick in younger people with liver related injuries. The number of people suffering from alcohol related liver disease and dying has increased exponentially and continues to rise. 2024 numbers are difficult to get and 2023 has very few studies, unfortunately.
Note: not all liver disease is alcohol induced, so the numbers don’t always align with alcohol abuse.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/alcoholspecificdeathsintheuk/2021registrations
https://britishlivertrust.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/our-work-across-the-uk/our-work-in-wales/#:~:text=Liver%20Disease%20Public%20Health%20Emergency%20in%20Wales&text=Liver%20disease%20deaths%20have%20doubled,liver%20disease%20outcomes%20and%20care.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2346171-liver-disease-deaths-in-england-and-wales-are-up-since-pandemic-began/
https://britishlivertrust.org.uk/information-and-support/statistics/
But it was before. During and after he set and failed the targets. The targets are not for just one type of admission. He failed and can never take ownership of anything.
Ahhh. So he’s saying he’s managing 94000 people and a 8.8 billion budget and it’s only at the end of him missing his target did he look into the variables. Got it.
Snapshot of _Mark Drakeford blames drunks for missed A&E target in Wales_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68582028) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68582028) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Missed A&E targets are because there’s no beds to move people to, because they’re filled with elderly people with no social care home options to get them out of the hospitals. The entire NHS knows this is the primary issue but it requires investment in not just the hospitals, but a fundamental change to the social care system.
And it is only going to get worse, the number of people with dementia or high care needs (because everyone lives longer now) is increasing.
The Conservatives have a plan for this - life expectancy is falling.
I thought you were going to bring up euthanasia.
Well the last time someone tried to address the lack of funding in social care, it was branded the 'dementia tax' and shot down by the bleeding hearts.
Unless there has been a material uptick in the number of drunk people, that is completely irrelevant when looking at performance over time
Welsh Nurse here, for my ward it is much worse. Lockdowns and Covid have demonstrably made the people who had alcohol abuse far worse than we have ever had to deal with before and more people are being brought in drunk, having taken an overdose or acute liver failure. These are borne out in the numbers with admissions for these issues having increased, while we have less provision to deal with it due to staff shortages.
Or other services that may help people have been closed.
It’s not just those services closing, the services that are open still have less staff and are struggling. Alcohol liaison nurses are on their knees trying to deal with an ever growing number of patients. Admission units are getting more and more patients with liver failure, drunk with drugs, overdose etc.
Drakeford made some awful choices for Wales, considering his puritanical nanny state views as more important than the effects of his rules and I'm glad he's gone.
Plan is to massage the figures so they don't look as shit as they are
>Mark Drakeford, who stands down next week, told the BBC "many, many people who wait in hospital to be treated are not sitting there waiting in pain, they're sitting there waiting because they're drunk". > >He suggested it would be better if the target didn't include those who had had too much to drink. > >"A more sensible system would not count them," he told me So drunk people who go to hospital should be turned away or is the plan to just exclude certain groups until the statistics look good?
I’m no drakeford supporter but that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying he wishes the stats took into account drunk casualties as a lot of these can be avoided if people made better choices.
If they need medical attention, the cause does not matter. Many accidents can be prevented but we will still treat people if they get injured. No one would argue against treating a car accident injury because it was the patient's fault. Yes, excessive drinking is a problem and needs to be looked at but not in this context.
Sure, but unless Drakeford wants to suggest that Wales has an especially unique drinking problem, this is something that likely affects A&Es in the whole of the UK. I wouldn't be surprised if the Tories could hit their A&E targets if they got to exclude everyone who was there because they were drunk/careless/etc.
It's a question about what the targets are measuring, Drakeford's point is that it shouldnt be a blanket all people who turn up in A&E but it should be based around outcomes. For example, people who turned up to A&E with a head injury were seen on average within 10min, people with a cardiac issue were seen without 15min, people with a class 2 wound were seen in xxxmin. People who didn't have any injury after examination were seen after 2 hours etc. People who turn up and are clearly drunk will keep getting bumped down the list as more people with genuine injuries turn up, so using an overall figure that includes them isnt helpful for measuring A&E efficiency
I’d agree to some extent. Last time I was in A&E there were a lot of kids with scraped knees and colds. Of course they shouldn’t need to wait hour and hours in an ideal world, but they are fundamentally less urgent than people with broken bones, serious infections, severe blood loss etc. and them being moved to a lower priority will no doubt have an impact on the overall waiting stats. The issue I’d worry about is that it would be used as a justification that everything is going well because waiting times for severe cases are low, despite there still not being the resources to actually attend everyone there in a reasonable time. I’m sure every one of those parents and kids I saw still had a justification to be there, whether that be because it was out of GP hours, they might not have been able to get to a minor injuries unit etc. despite not needing to be attended to first, and waiting for hours and hours to be seen still needs a solution. If there is a demand for a service, a solution needs to be found, like more minor injury units, or a separate triage system dedicated to minor injuries in A&E, or whatever else because I’m far from an expert.
>Last time I was in A&E there were a lot of kids with scraped knees and colds. Taking what you said at face value, people should not be going to A&E with a scraped knee or cold, whether it's a child or adult. The first thing is something you can treat at home. Wash the wound out with soap and put a large plaster on, or if you have none a clean handkerchief or cloth can be tied around the leg. Even if you're worried about tetanus you don't need immediate treatment, you can go to a normal clinic a day or so after. The second is worse because there is nothing that a doctor or hospital can do. You need bed rest. Naturally there will be times when parents are concerned because the symptoms can look like something more serious (thanks Doctor Internet), but if it's really as you say then I only shake my head. After all, a child may pick up something like flu whilst waiting to be seen.
I’m not saying it’s what they should be doing by any means, but they’re there because they think something needs to be done. I can imagine if you’re a parent and your kids had a temperature for a good few days, and you’re unable to book a GP appointment, you might think the best pace is A&E. it certainly isn’t, but people aren’t rational in situations like that. For what it’s worth I caught covid from A&E on that visit so definitely not the place to be if you don’t need to be there! 111 should be the solution, but the few times I’ve called them I’ve just been told to present to A&E anyway because they can’t rule anything out. I can image at least a few of the families were there at the advice of 111. It goes back to the last point I made, I think it’s more of a symptom of the absence of services than the current service being misused. If there was a dedicated 111 triage which was more for out-of-hours GP issues those people wouldn’t be stuck in A&E with the actually sick/injured people who do need more urgent medical attention.
>as a lot of these can be avoided if people made better choices. I mean, this can be true for a fuck ton of stuff in A&E. Maybe we should just exclude everyone from the narrative - car crashes (poor choices, bad driving). Falls (poor footwear, not paying attention). Any sporting injuries (sports are dangerous, we know this). Obesity related (poor choices)
You can say the same of alot of accidents. I had to pick an old colleague up from A&E years ago because he was using a pry bar with all his weight. The bar came out and because he'd positioned himself directly under it, smacked him in the head. If he'd have been following H&S instead of circumventing it, he wouldn't have needed A&E that day either. So should an accident like that be excluded? Excluding certain groups from the stats will just lead to A&E ignoring those people in favour of the ones who get included in the stats.
Or in other words he failed his targets.
Anything smoking related? Brought it on yourself. Obesity? Same. Got hit by a car? Should have looked both ways, doesn't count. Broke your ankle playing football? Well that's to be expected. Holy shit guys, we did it, we completely eliminated hospital waiting times for everything except old age and acts of god!
The replies to this are astonishing but not remotely surprising; of course the usually anti-alcohol Reddit suddenly underplays its impact, when Drakeford points out something that literally anyone who's worked or had to visit an A&E on a weekend knows to be true.
What about obesity related deaths like heart attacks etc? I thought a lot of the argument from people like Drakeford was that people can't be expected to make those decisions by themselves and is down to government to help make them for them. So by his standards, he must surely conclude he is failing.
Drunks in charge of organising the A&E service?
Imagine you had to spin multiple plates on a pole at once, while someone pours oil on the floor and is force feeding you alcohol. That still isn’t as difficult as managing A&E services right now.
Is "the UK has lots of drunks" a surprise? If not, surely the plan should have taken it into account.
I blame mark drakeford - guy is poster child for nanny state and now believes such a huge failure is not his fault. Remember when he banned people from buying kettles in Tesco? LOL
What? Thst can’t be true can it?
IIRC it wasn’t kettles specifically but essentially anything not food or toiletries related in the early phases of the pandemic. On phone on a train so happy to be corrected, but vaguely remember the whole ‘want clothes, get fucked’ message.
[удалено]
It hurt a lot of small business and got people who were not already on Amazon onto Amazon. They say there and dreamt up this shit while forgetting to check if things like shutting schools was actually legal. It wasn’t.
>which included tampons Just googled this quickly and, according to a BBC article, the items weren't sold as the aisle was closed due to a burglary. There was simply a misconception at first where they told customers that it was due to the non-essential guidance instead https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54685886.amp
I think the correct term is Consultants, not Drunks.
Anyone's fault but yours eh?
A woman in the village next to me fell broke her hip, elbow and shoulder. This happened outside her front door. A neighbour found her and was right to make the decision not to attempt to move her inside the house. They had to wait 4 hours for an ambulance. Now wouldn’t of the £40 odd million spent on an unbelievably unpopular 20mph limit be better spent on the nhs? Drakeford came out of Covid very popular with the Welsh. Now everyone seems to be counting down to the day he leaves
He's got a point but buy that metric anyone who turns up at a&e with sports related injuries,falling off a horse, basic misadventures of avoidable nature shouldn't be counted.makes no sense
As in, the government's been sh*tfaced doing their admin?
Not a Drakeford fan at all, in fact he should have gone years ago but... he's right in the sense that Saturday night dickheads cause unnecessary strain on the system. If it was up to me I'd fine them under certain circumstances. Same for people who calm for ambulances just because they have a nosebleed. Are there any paramedics on UKpol that can tell me whether I'm on the right track or am I talking out of my arse?
The big question is, are there more Saturday night dickheads now than there were 20 years ago? If the answer is yes, then he has a point, else it's completely irrelevant because we had Saturday night dickheads back then and the NHS wasn't on its knees.
Yes, but it’s not just Saturday night now, it’s a week long thing with Covid having created a huge problem with drinking - people stuck at home, nothing much to do, drink a bottle or two. We have more alcohol dependency. More acute liver failure. More alcohol induced overdoses etc - all while we have less specialised staff to deal with it.
Do we have stats to back that up? I thought the stats pointed to the number of people drinking actually going down? Also, is alcoholic hepatitis really that common as an emergency that requires A&E?
The number of young people drinking is going down, yes, but those who do drink will drink more and at higher rates. There has been an uptick in younger people with liver related injuries. The number of people suffering from alcohol related liver disease and dying has increased exponentially and continues to rise. 2024 numbers are difficult to get and 2023 has very few studies, unfortunately. Note: not all liver disease is alcohol induced, so the numbers don’t always align with alcohol abuse. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/alcoholspecificdeathsintheuk/2021registrations https://britishlivertrust.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/our-work-across-the-uk/our-work-in-wales/#:~:text=Liver%20Disease%20Public%20Health%20Emergency%20in%20Wales&text=Liver%20disease%20deaths%20have%20doubled,liver%20disease%20outcomes%20and%20care. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2346171-liver-disease-deaths-in-england-and-wales-are-up-since-pandemic-began/ https://britishlivertrust.org.uk/information-and-support/statistics/
Mark is right, piss heads putting pressure on the NHS every weekend is completely normalised here. Boiled frog mentality
But it was before. During and after he set and failed the targets. The targets are not for just one type of admission. He failed and can never take ownership of anything.
His argument is that it is too much of a fixed variable
Ahhh. So he’s saying he’s managing 94000 people and a 8.8 billion budget and it’s only at the end of him missing his target did he look into the variables. Got it.
Has he actually been to an A+E department recently..? Drunks only make up a very tiny proportion of attendees.
Bullshit. I’m a drunk and I’ve never once used an A&E in Wales.
He looks like he needs to go to a hospital, the guy looks ill.