Postscript to the A&E saga

The district nurse called again this morning and confirmed all is well with my new knee but she will come back again on Thursday to be certain.
 
 
I ask her if it is usual to turf people put of Accident & Emergency in the middle of the night telling them to make their own way home.
 
Yes, unfortunately it is, she said. The hospital is aware of the problem but they don’t have the beds to let patients stay until the morning.
 
The problem is exacberated now because people have discovered that rather than wait three weeks for a doctors appointment with their local GP they can pop along to A&E late at night.
And at the other end of the scale are older people who have no one they can ring up in the middle of the night to come and get them if they should find themselves, as I did, stranded there recently.
 
Families these days are either living too far away, or even in another part of the country, and friends are likely to be equally old and unable to jump out of bed at short notice, then drive half an hour in the middle of the night through country lanes to collect a friend. ( In my case M has a heart condition so I would not ask him).
 
She says it is a growing dilemma and another example of the strain our NHS is under.
 
 As for paying for a taxi “ many people would not have £30 in cash in the house.”
 
As they say growing old is not for wimps.
 
 

Blipfoto –yet more flowers which arrived today. I am fast running out of vases.