In 2015 I left the UK to provide humanitarian medical care to a refugee camp stuck in the midst of a civil war. The camp’s population quadrupled in the space of four months while I was there and the onset of the rainy season led to a demand for care that exceeded all expectations.
Hundreds queued to the door of the hospital with an official capacity of 90. Patients shared mattresses and sat in corridors. Where else could they go? They were sick and needed treatment and sending them home without medical care would often have been a death sentence – there were no other hospitals within hundreds of miles.
As the death toll rose in our camp, an emergency was declared. Last week the British Red Cross declared that the NHS is facing a “humanitarian crisis” too. Dr Mark Holland, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, admitted that this was strong wording but “not a million miles away from the truth”. We may not have thousands of people suffering on shared mattresses, but we do have thousands of our sick and our elderly and our children needlessly suffering in corridors around the country.
We have intensive care units that have to ship patients to distant hospitals in search of capacity. One month ago we ran out of intensive care beds for children throughout Leicester and the whole of London.
It may not be a civil war, epidemic or earthquake causing this crisis, but a hurricane of political ineptitude, denial and poor funding. There is an over-reliance on the compassion, blood, sweat and tears of NHS staff around the country. Staff that are already working 24/7, despite the suggestions we need a seven day NHS.
The symptoms are already visible, NHS workers are stretched. In a humanitarian crisis, people work to breaking point, burning themselves out in their endeavour to save people, often in the knowledge that they will go home to recuperate and resume their “normal” job. In the UK, NHS staff don’t have that luxury. This is their life and they are at breaking point.
The mantra we repeat to drivers that “tiredness kills” seems to be easily forgotten. Mistakes will happen. In Worcestershire, two poor souls died waiting for beds in a corridor, forgotten and lost amid the tsunami of other people waiting to be admitted.
I challenge any nurse or doctor to maintain that in the current environment the same could not happen in their own A&E department. From our state-of-the-art trauma centres to our small district general hospitals, we are overwhelmed. Suggestions by the health secretary that 30% of people attending A&E do not need to be seen in A&E does not solve the fact that 18,000 people in one week required A&E and waited over four hours to be admitted to a ward.
When the death toll in our refugee camp exploded, my organisation responded by providing more resources and staff. The levels of death and suffering began to drop. We know the costs of not responding quickly to a medical crisis. In 2014 the initial alarms raised by health professionals in response to the number of reported cases of Ebola in west Africa went largely ignored. They were further downplayed for months. This delay ultimately led to the unwarranted death of thousands of people and a panic on a global scale.
The problems faced by the NHS are complex and there is no easy solution, but perhaps the British Red Cross’s recent declaration is not wholly inappropriate. A humanitarian crisis is defined as a singular event, or a series of events that are threatening in terms of the health, safety or wellbeing of a community. This isn’t some faraway country seeing a civil war, epidemic or flood. But a slow-burning, manmade disaster of our own governing. The death toll I pray will not go in the thousands, but thousands are already suffering.
Do you have a secret aid worker story you’d like to tell? You can contact us confidentially at globaldevpros@theguardian.com – please put “Secret aid worker” in the subject line. If you’d like to encrypt your email to us, here are instructions on how to set up a PGP mail client and our public PGP key.
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter.
Secret aid worker: Is the NHS really comparable to a humanitarian crisis?
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder