This is from the Save Southend NHS Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SaveSouthendNHS/

Our local #NHS staff have provided another confidential update from the front line and we thank them for speaking out in order to help us fight for our local communities.

“Yesterday there were only a handful of discharges from the hospital – needless to say there was no respite from ambulances arriving. During a recent shift (I won’t say which as it narrows the options of who was on duty if days and times are given), every cubicle in the main department had a patient in it awaiting an inpatient bed for either the medical or surgical teams and ambulances were lining up 10 deep. We were treating some patients in the minors cubicles that should have been in the main area of the department and one or two of those arguably should have been in Resus. Nurses are frequently not getting breaks, cutting them short or staying beyond their finish time in a desperate attempt to keep on-top of the workload. We had paramedics looking after patients in the Paediatric ED overnight, just so they were not all in a cold corridor and patients were waiting too long for basic investigations because there simply was no physical room in which to do them, that didn’t already have someone else just as sick or even sicker in it already”.

We have no words. Our campaign would love to say these kind of shifts are one-offs but they are becoming a regular occurrence thanks to the appalling lack of investment in the NHS and social care as a whole. Despite these appalling front line reports, the Mid and South Essex STP are set to slash a further £30 million annually from Southend’s budget.

Our hospital ( and all of the hospitals within the STP footprint) require investment to EXPAND instead of carving them up and transporting Southend’s most sick and acutely unwell and vulnerable patients out to Basildon and Broomfield using a ‘transport service’ that the STP have not even detailed how they will recruit into, fund vehicles or supply the appropriately trained Drs, nurses and support staff plus equipment to manage critically ill patients en route to elsewhere.

There are already pathways in place and operational for certain types of acute trauma emergencies to transfer out but they want to implement more and more – many of which are dangerous and not in the best interests of patient care in our opinion.

Their ill conceived and mostly premature plans have to be stopped.

We do not currently have the community health and social care systems in place to prevent such high A&E attendances and hospital admission rates, nor the social care bed space or staffing capacity to facilitate early discharge once patients are medically fit… and by that, we don’t want your CareRooms AirBnB schemes either.

Until the STP provides black and white evidence of primary care investment capital and concrete plans where they will magic practitioners from, bearing in mind the massive GP, student nurse, paramedic and allied health professional crisis – then we will fight the proposed changes to acute hospital services unless the ‘on the floor’ clinicians and leads deem them safe and beneficial to patient outcomes.

LOBBY YOUR MP AND LOCAL COUNCILLORS NOW!!!

– We demand a properly funded, properly staffed, public NHS service.

– We want our busy general hospital expanded – not downgraded.

– We don’t want private bed allocation in our NHS hospitals.

– We don’t want to be cared for by staff who are running themselves into the ground and faced with their own health suffering in order to provide a basic level of care. This has to stop.

#SaveOurNHS #SaveSouthend #NoSTP