Sicko Fun Fact: English Hospitals Resort to “Patient Stacking” to Meet NHS Goals

Why wouldn’t we want a system like England’s here? From the Daily Mail:

Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets.

Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour pledge.

The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 999 calls.

Doctors warned last night that the practice of “patient-stacking” was putting patients’ health at risk.

Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show that last year 43,576 patients waited longer than one hour before being let into emergency units.

Only seven out of 11 ambulance trusts responded to the survey, so the true figure could be far higher.

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb is writing to health secretary Alan Johnson to demand an urgent investigation into the practice.

“This is evidence of shocking systematic failure in our emergency services,” he said.

Labour brought in the four-hour A&E target to end the scandal of patients waiting for days in casualty or being kept on trolleys in corridors.

But a shortage of out-of-hours GP care, after thousands of doctors opted out of treating patients outside working hours under lucrative new contracts, means more and more are going to casualty units, putting them under greater pressure.

Dr Jonathan Fielden of the British Medical Association said: “The vast majority of patients coming into hospital by ambulance are in critical need of care in hospital and therefore delay can worsen their outcome.”

Sam Oestreicher of Unison, which represents most ambulance workers, said: “Ambulances should not be used as mobile waiting rooms. They should be freed to do their job.

They should be but under a government run system they will never be. The government is not in the business of helping people, it’s in the business of running things which means that individuals who die are less important than the smooth running of their system.

So when you’re waiting in an ambulance for two days here after the Dems pass their “free” health care, remember that you had all the facts in front of you and voted Democrat anyway.