Former nurse, 84, removed her own eye cyst after years of waiting
The woman, who is still waiting for an eye operation, initially waited three years to be seen after being placed on the ophthalmology waiting list in 2019.She had some procedures but said they "did not help", so was eventually driven to carry out the dangerous procedure herself, according to the report."She is waiting for an eye operation, which was requested in October 2023, and her eyesight is deteriorating rapidly," it said."As a former nurse and nurse manager, she has given her working life to care for other people. Now she needs some care of her own."The report described long waits experienced by patients in the emergency departments at Ysbyty Gwynedd, Ysbyty Wrexham Maelor, and Ysbyty Glan Clwyd hospitals.Patients were found to be waiting up to 36 hours and "overcrowding, uncertainty, and discomfort" were also common concerns.The public consultation had been part of a "listening and understanding" initiative aimed at improving the design and delivery of care and services.There had been 300 enquiries from MPs and MSs over their constituents' experiences, with waiting times the main focus.
Another case was a man who wanted to join the Army, but was unable to because of the health of his teeth.The report said the man had not been able to find an NHS dentist nearby due to a "chronic shortage" of dentists in north Wales, and private dentists quoted a minimum of £3,000 for treatment.Community conversations highlighted issues over outpatient waiting times, access to services, ambulance and emergency department delays, and communication.Waiting was found to have had a "catastrophic impact" on one patient's life who suffered daily pain, and another, awaiting an operation for bladder stones, endured "continual bleeding".
Llais, the body which gives people a "voice" when accessing health services, also gathered data which found people had "significant challenges" accessing timely and affordable primary care, difficulty accessing GP appointments and the absence or loss of NHS dental provision.Delayed treatment or self-management of dental problems had manifested sometimes in "unsafe or distressing" ways, including one patient "filling their own tooth with a kit from the dentist". Another patient reported waiting "12 hours in a corridor on a trolley".Long delays for specialist services, including audiology, cataract surgery, neuro-developmental assessment, and respiratory care were also "a major concern".A meeting to discuss the report heard that despite many people highlighting "dissatisfaction or frustration", many other participants had also expressed "gratitude" and praise for the "professionalism and compassion" by hospital staff, members and teams.The report said measures had been taken by the board to address calls for improvements.In dental care, this included creating contracts worth more than £1.5m to expand NHS dental provision and a new dental access portal, launched in February, was also helping "simplify and centralise" access to care.Further procurement exercises, covering general dental services, orthodontics, oral surgery, and non-urgent access, also totalled more than £5m.Improvements to areas such as emergency departments, dermatology, gynaecology, physiotherapy musculoskeletal, cancer services, and a midwifery ward bereavement suite had also been implemented.In neuro-developmental services, it said a child and adolescent mental health improvement programme was in place to provide mental health support for children and young people.
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The Herald Scotland
28 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
My nephew's life was put on hold by Long Covid
Long Covid cuts a swathe through the lives of children and adults alike, and the numbers affected are staggering. In Scotland alone, there are estimated to be over 185,000 people with this disease, living with debilitating symptoms like crushing fatigue, brain fog, digestive problems, breathing difficulties and muscle weakness. My lovely nephew is one of those people. He was an energetic student in his final year at Glasgow University when he caught Covid-19 aged 22 and has been laid low by Long Covid since. He was full of plans, to work and travel, but instead, had to give up his job and move back in with his parents. Read More: It's been like watching someone being drugged and restrained. His body cries out for sleep but rest doesn't refresh him. He could sleep for 10 hours and still wake up feeling shattered. Most days since being infected, he has had a painful upset stomach. Like other people with Long Covid, he has bad days and better days, but can never predict what's coming. Some days he can do things, others he can barely hold a conversation. All that is bad enough, but what compounds the distress is the lack of meaningful support. To say that NHS support services are inadequate to meet people's needs would be a laughable understatement. My nephew's experience of GPs he has seen is that he knows more about Long Covid than they do. In fact he puts it more bluntly than that: 'Most don't have a clue.' In spite of ministers' insistence that there are clear referral pathways for people with Long Covid in Scotland, reports by the ALLIANCE and Chest, Heart and Stroke Scotland show that the overwhelming majority of people struggle to get the support they need – a finding that is borne out by members of Long Covid Scotland. Again and again, people report having to research treatments themselves or turn to private GPs to get help that is not offered on the NHS – that's if they can afford it. As my nephew puts it, people feel 'abandoned' and have to figure out the way forward for themselves. The inadequacy of NHS support services has been the focus of campaigning by charities Long Covid Scotland and Long Covid Kids since they were set up, but they are at the end of their tether. This week, in protest at the Scottish Government's inaction, the two organisations formally resigned from the Scotland's Long Covid Strategic Network, which reports to the Scottish Government. They are exasperated and angry that after announcing a £4.5m one-year, non-recurring fund for people with Long Covid, ME, and chronic fatigue in December, ministers have yet to allocate a penny of it, and that this comes after years in which a previous £10m failed to deliver proper support for people with Long Covid. Trust has broken down. 'What was framed as a hopeful investment now stands as a symbol of inaction and broken promises,' says Jane Ormerod, the chair of Long Covid Scotland. The charities' verdict is withering. Instead of support being ramped up, they state that some services are being decommissioned, with still no provision at all for children and young people in most areas. They say that people with lived experience of Long Covid have consistently seen their input sidelined and that most health boards have disengaged from the network but the government hasn't intervened. They state: 'The Scottish Government remains functionally absent from the network: no oversight, no leadership, and no enforcement of its own Long Covid Service policy requirements. 'Faith has been lost. 'Too many times we have listened to assurances within the network followed by inaction.' Scots with Long Covid, they say, have been 'repeatedly let down'. That they've run out of patience is entirely understandable. A Holyrood Committee inquiry two years ago found that 'almost all individual respondents to the call for views spoke of a lack of awareness among medical professionals, GPs in particular, in terms of assessing patients, diagnosing long Covid and providing treatment options'. People told the Holyrood committee they had been 'gaslighted' and struggled to get their experience taken seriously. This just shouldn't happen, given the strong the international evidence that exists on Long Covid and how it presents. Research into Long Covid is ongoing, and no one expects a miracle cure, but the dim understanding of it among many medical professionals, the lack of clear treatment pathways for many sufferers and the history of broken promises, fall well short of what people have a right to expect. The effect of it all is that many people in the grip of a life-changing illness are being left without meaningful medical care. The Public Health Minister Jenni Minto says she regrets the charities' departure from the Long Covid network and that ministers are working with NHS Boards, preparing to set out how the £4.5m will be spent. But the charities have no faith in government promises. Perhaps the saddest aspect of all this is the experience of children and young people. Helen Goss, the Scottish lead for Long Covid Kids, says the system 'continues to fail the very people it was created to support'. The charities quote an 11-year-old with Long Covid in Edinburgh, who says: "I have nothing, no health, no fun, no life. No one seems to care.' Four years on from the height of the pandemic, the lack of meaningful support for children and adults with Long Covid is hard to excuse. The Scottish Government promises action – again – but for those living with this every day, it's way too late. Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on Bluesky at @ and on X at @BecMcQ
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The biggest problem for Starmer and co: the machinery of government is broken and they can't fix it
In one of my favourite Seinfeld episodes, George Costanza is sitting in a New York diner and – this shows how long ago it was – reading his morning paper. Suddenly he folds the paper up, sets it down on the table and looks across to his companion with weary exasperation. Why, he asks, does the high-minded New York Times refuse to accept that China is a turn-off? Just like George, many readers will at some stage probably have experienced a similar feeling. Perhaps it was about China, but perhaps about something completely different. Call it the 'not right now' syndrome. It is the syndrome that recognises that a subject might be important, but reading a lengthy report about it can be another thing altogether. Journalists know from bitter experience that prisons are often a turn-off as well. Prisons are remote, often unpleasant places. Most people have never been inside one, and are happy to keep it that way. It is important that prisons exist, of course. They do a difficult but necessary job. Hopefully they do it well. In most respects, though, prisons are out of public sight and, as a result, out of public mind. Until they are not. Today is one of those times when 'not right now' no longer cuts it. The reason is the publication this week of a truly devastating report by Anne Owers, the former chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales, on the mishandling of prison capacity. The report lays bare the reasons why prisons have become so consistently overcrowded over so many years to the point of frequent near-collapse. But, as it does so, it also makes clear that the underlying cause is neither a surge in human wickedness nor a rise in overzealous sentencing by the courts. Instead, the cause is bad and broken government. This is why the report, indispensable though it is for understanding the prisons crisis, is also important in a wider sense. It reads like an account of not just a government department on the verge of failure, but a whole nation state. Owers shows how overcrowding has its roots in a conflicted approach that has been deeply entrenched among generations of politicians. On the one hand, 21st-century governments have all promised more police and tougher sentences. On the other, they have all promised to cut departmental spending, to hold taxes down and to outsource programmes. As there are almost no voters in prisons, the criminal justice system became a prime target for cuts. But the two policies were – and are – contradictory. The upshot was too many prisoners and not enough prisons or cells to house them in. This reached crisis point under Rishi Sunak's government in October 2023, when Owers says the criminal justice system was within three days of meltdown. Early release schemes were hurriedly but grudgingly implemented. Many of the same pressures still exist under Labour today. Money is still tight and courts are still busy. The possibility of mass arrests this weekend in response to Palestine Action protests is simply the latest example of the system's lack of headroom. Owers has two particular criticisms of systemic government failings. The first is that the response to our prisons crisis between 2022 and 2024 was far too bureaucratic and repetitive. Several committees, often involving the same people, found themselves endlessly having the same discussions without triggering action. The second is that 'surviving the day' then became the overriding preoccupation for government. The approach in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which oversees prisons policy, was to manage the crisis, doing 'as little as possible as late as possible'. But there is a third, very important criticism lurking in her account. Ministers were far too slow and unwilling to face the facts. Sometimes this was true even within the MoJ itself, but the main resistance was from the Home Office, the Treasury and 10 Downing Street. The Home Office had an interest in talking tough and, as the former justice secretary Alex Chalk put it this week: 'Some home secretaries' egos will be writing cheques that the MoJ is expected to cash.' The Treasury tried to hold the line against all increased expenditure. No 10 played for time because it feared the political optics of early release schemes. The sum of these actions was government without leadership. Some of this has changed under Labour. The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, did well by commissioning three important independent reports on different aspects of the criminal justice process – Owers on prison capacity, David Gauke on sentencing, and Sir Brian Leveson on the criminal courts' backlog – all of which (compare and contrast the Covid inquiry) have been briskly completed within a few months, their recommendations mainly accepted. The wider problems in Whitehall, however, remain. Mahmood still has to get all the changes in these reports past the Home Office, the Treasury and No 10, at a time when all three are preoccupied by Reform UK. Yet crisis processes and pressures are not in any way unique to the MoJ. On the contrary, they can apply across any part of government. Every Whitehall department has its hands tied by Treasury oversight. Think of the way the NHS, and thus the health department for England, moves into surviving-the-day mode as soon as winter looms. There are lessons in the Owers report for areas such as health and social care, welfare, policing, defence and education, as well as justice. All of this poses a collective challenge for the way that the British state is organised and does its business. It can be addressed, and perhaps answered, with skill and good fortune in one of two ways. One is by ever-more crisis management, in which, as Sam Freedman puts it in his book Failed State, politicians and officials 'keep using the machinery we have, making promises they can't keep, pulling levers that aren't there, filling newspapers with announcements of actions that never happen'. That approach is broken. The other approach is for a more draconian reform of priorities. The Owers report depicts a system that does not work. Yesterday's report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research argued that, in her autumn budget, Rachel Reeves must either cut spending or raise taxes by more than £40bn if she is to balance the books without breaking Labour's election promises. These are defining reminders of what is now at stake. It is foolish not to recognise that there are no easy choices here. The pitch has not been rolled with the public for change and the chances of success are uncertain. But it is no less foolish not to recognise – right now – that we cannot go on as we are. Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Transplant plea from Hartlepool man on record waiting list
A man living with stage five kidney disease due to complications from type 1 diabetes has shared his story in the hope of encouraging more transplant donors to come Webb, from Hartlepool, is one of more than 8,000 people in the UK currently on the active transplant waiting list, the highest recorded number spends more than four hours on a dialysis machine three times a week while he waits for a transplant, with the average wait time about three and a half doctors described an "urgent need" for donors to register their intention, Mr Webb said: "Every time the phone rings, you're wondering is this the transplant team." He said the needles required for his dialysis, which filters waste from the blood when the kidneys cannot perform the function, can be three inches (7.6cm) long and "really uncomfortable".Missing even one session can be particularly dangerous, he said."I've had fluid overload... it's absolute torture," he said. Mr Webb, who has been on the transplant list since February, said he previously trained as a chef but had been unable to work while undergoing treatment. "I enjoy cooking and [would] like to go back and work in a kitchen again." 'One donor helps nine' Specialist organ donation nurse Dominic Manning, based in Newcastle, said the transplant list was so long now that "someone will die every day waiting for an organ transplant".NHS Blood and Transplant said there were 100 fewer deceased organ donors last year than in Anthony Clarkson said: "We urgently need more people to register their decision to donate and to have these vital conversations with their families."Meanwhile Mr Webb hopes that sharing his story will encourage others to consider organ donation and ensure their loved ones know of their decision."From one person you can save and prolong and improve the quality of life of nine different people," he said. Follow BBC Tees on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
