UK ERs: Get treated in 4 hours… or not
Posted on February 18th, 2008 by bile Categories and Tags: Uncategorized, Alan Johnson, economics, emergency services, healthcare, nanny state, NHS, Norman Lamb, socialism, UKSeriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets.Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour pledge.
The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 999 calls.
Doctors warned last night that the practice of “patient-stacking” was putting patients’ health at risk.
Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show that last year 43,576 patients waited longer than one hour before being let into emergency units.
More than 40,000 patients were kept in ambulances for at least an hour before entering A&E last year
Only seven out of 11 ambulance trusts responded to the survey, so the true figure could be far higher.
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb is writing to health secretary Alan Johnson to demand an urgent investigation into the practice.
“This is evidence of shocking systematic failure in our emergency services,” he said.
Is it me or does 4+ hours not sound like emergency speed? The last quote of the article asks us to take into account that they have over 4 million “patient journeys undertaken by emergency vehicles in 2006/07.” So over 1% of those who take rides in a emergency vehicle spend over an hour in the parking lot because they don’t want to start the clock on the “guaranteed” 4 hours or less treatment in the ER? Over 5 hours. Two things are possibly happening. Because of the ease of access and lack of direct cost to the individual the ER is abused by people who do not actually need emergency care. As a result those who do need care are held up in line waiting for those irresponsible ER users to get through the system. As I’ve and others have said many times before when you attempt ignore the laws of economics you will fail. When you deincentivize personal responsibility you will get less of it. If I have to pay more taxes for “free” emergency care which takes hours or less taxes, higher one time costs and faster care… I’ll gladly take the latter. I don’t understand how people can be OK with replacing potentially more costly care with longer waiting periods. Is waiting months and years in a queue really worth the money supposedly saved when getting serious treatments?
5 Responses to “UK ERs: Get treated in 4 hours… or not”
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February 19th, 2008 at 9:41 am
From MSNBC:
So are we doing any better? I don’t know, but I would agree with you that our system probably has a better chance at actually improving than the socialized counterpart.
February 19th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
No we aren’t. And who’s system is moving towards who’s? Our ERs must serve even person who comes in regardless of ability to pay. As a result of our labeling of people as “illegal immigrants”, mixed with the governments other meddling in the healthcare system including artificially increasing scarcity, “illegals” are using ERs as general practioners as are other poorer folks who can’t afford healthcare thus clogging the pipes. If we didn’t have.such a socialistic system charitys would be able to suvive in the market again and releave the hospitals of the current burden. When the government is the source of such a large percentage of the healthcare dollars spent and regulates as it does I don’t want to hear anyone claim we have anything close to a free healthcare market when comparing to other socialist systems.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I swear to god if I had a nickel for every time you mentioned scarcity there would no longer be a scarcity of nickels in my life.
Also for the record it took me approximately 40 minutes in the car to come up with this joke, I’ve been waiting for you to mention scarcity again so I can use it and I re-looked-up the economic term scarcity on wikipedia before posting this so that my usage would be cromulent.
February 20th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Use of Private Care Tests British Health System
February 20th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Nice to see the NYT pick up something like that. Because of assholes like Michael Moore too large a percentage of the US think the socialist systems are "free" and faultless and magical. Now if more economists and Ron Paul’s came out and explained to people that such systems don’t fail because of bad management but because they simply can not survive. They are economically infeasible and destined to collapse.