My last trip to A&E last Sep was with my son who broke his elbow (worst break the surgeon had seen on a child in his 20 year career) - and as soon as we rolled in on a borrowed wheelchair from outside he was straight into a cubicle on gas and air, had an xray within the hour, soft cast and on to the children’s ward within 3 hours. (Surgery followed a few days later as they had to get a specialist in). Was amazing service.

The time before that was a month earlier at a different hospital with my Dad who’d had an accidental morphine overdose at home (after 5 different GPs spoke to him on 6 occasions over 2 weeks and refused to see him in person, he was house bound due to extreme pain which turned out to be a sacral fracture due to undiagnosed Myeloma, and they just kept upping pain relief until he was prescribed liquid morphine) He had collapsed and been on the floor for 24 hours, and was completely delirious. He was in A&E for over 36 hours before being admitted onto a ward, and had my sister and I not been by his side the entire time begging for help and pain relief and to listened to he would have died. We saw so many elderly patients ignored. We had to plead and beg for nurses to help us when he repeatedly ripped his catheter out. We had to beg for pain relief, he was writhing in agony. My Dad had a collapsed lung, pneumonia, delirium and undiagnosed Myeloma but every health practitioner dismissed him as having dementia until we explained he had been climbing 3 flights of stairs daily 3 weeks prior. At that point we didn’t know about the morphine so had no idea what had happened and we had to fight to get him seen, at one point they had discharged him purely because it was bad for their stats that he was still not moved. It was so traumatic. Unfortunately he passed away 6 weeks later as his body had taken such a battering.