A friend twisted his knee badly playing football last week. In considerable pain next morning and able to bend the knee only with difficulty he contemplated going to an Accident and Emergency unit at a London hospital. The alternative was to assume his injury was what he took it to be — a twisted knee, no more — and that there was no point in queuing for many hours only to be told to bandage it up, take a painkiller and anti-inflammatory tablets, borrow a pair of crutches and try to rest the knee as much as possible. Such things he could organise without specialist advice.
But he opted to go to A&E after work. For two reasons. First, what if it were more serious than it looked? Second, maybe the queue would only be for an hour or two at most, and he would be able to join a group of us for dinner later that evening, as planned.
In the event the queue was for four and a half hours, the advice was as outlined above, and he missed dinner.
That mirrors what happened to me under a Tory government when I suspected I’d cracked a couple of ribs (and indeed had); wondered whether to bother with A&E as there’s nothing you can do with cracked ribs but wait for them to heal; and decided on balance to go to St Thomas’s Hospital because (a) what if a cracked rib were to threaten a lung? And (b) Maybe I could probably be out of there in less than three hours and return to work after lunch? The wait was about four and a half hours, I missed a whole day’s work, and there was in fact no need to have gone at all.
The throughput of A&E units over the last decade is said to have increased substantially but, though the government does claim that waiting times have gone down, this is not the experience of most I speak to.
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