“Until it happens to you directly or to someone close to you, you don’t realize how badly our healthcare system is on its knees”, testifies the British Debby Blouet. At the beginning of July, his father, a resident of the vicinity of Stroud (in Gloucestershire, in the south of England), aged 76, suddenly found himself ill, with great difficulty in breathing. “He couldn’t even get up and take two steps without being very out of breath. He called 999 [le numéro des urgences], where he was told there were no ambulances available to take him to the hospital. My sister, who lives closer to home than me, about a twenty minute drive, had to drive it herself. »
Arriving at the hospital, around 6 p.m., the daughter and her father find the parking lot full of ambulances, with their patients inside, waiting for a bed or stretcher to become available in the emergency room. Debbie Blouet’s father had to wait until 4 a.m. to see a doctor, who sent him home. He had to wait until the next day to be hospitalized. “He is better, fortunately. But people are going to die because of our saturated ERs”worries M.me Blouet.
The sacrosanct NHS, the British public and free healthcare system, is going through a deep crisis: exhausted by the pandemic and, before it, by ten years of underinvestment, it lacks up to 50,000 nurses and 12,000 doctors. just in England. Access to GPs is becoming increasingly complicated – 6.2 million Britons are on waiting lists, awaiting cancer treatment or surgery. But it is the ambulance services which now constitute the visible part of the crisis, the first bottleneck for patients just upstream of hospital emergencies.
A sometimes fatal wait
What would have happened to M’s fatherme Blouet if his daughter hadn’t been able to carry him? More and more Britons find themselves destitute, while the eleven ambulance companies working for the NHS in England and Wales respond less and less quickly, if at all, to the call. Staff shortages, linked to low salaries or the resurgence of Covid-19, are aggravated by this habit of keeping the sick in vehicles while beds become available. British ambulance companies have all simultaneously declared a “critical accident” July 12, meaning they were unable to meet demand.
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