“He’d not slept, not really eaten, he’d hardly drunk anything”: Grandfather, 76, forced to wait 27 hours in A&E before being sent home as there was no bed
Melvin Terry from Kent, is a retired design office manager and grandfather of six, who suffers from a heart condition.
His son, Robert Terry told LBC when he arrived in the hospital on Monday morning, he was horrified to see his Dad sat in the wheelchair on the same spot he'd left him in A&E. "But I'm not trying to have a go at the NHS because they are doing what they can with what they've got.It's part of a wider crisis in the NHS affecting emergency wait times.
Rory Deighton is Acute Lead at the NHS Confederation. He says the crisis is caused by a mix of years of underinvestment and a current staffing crisis: "People are choosing not to work in social care anymore, but to go to the hospitality and retail sectors, so we are failing to support people to live independently in their own homes, and emergency departments are the places where we pick up the pieces for all that.”