Medics at an Aberdeen hospital are “exhausted” as winter pressures worsen what was already extreme pressure on the service.
STV News went behind the scenes at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary to take a deeper look into what is happening at the hospital as it struggles with staffing shortages and long patient wait times.
It reported instances of staff being booed at in waiting rooms and the mental impact the situation is having on those working in the hospital.
This year, health boards across the country have recorded the worst A&E wait times on record.
NHS Grampian aims to see 95% of patients within four hours at ARI, but in the last week of October, only 55.3% were seen within this time period.
Medics working in the heart of the hospital told STV News they were struggling on a ward where the 12 beds are sometimes expected to accommodate 200 patients in 24 hours.
‘Demoralising’
Last week, a report laid out by Aberdeen’s health and social care partnership said staffing problems in NHS Grampian raise the potential for “loss of life and unmet health and social care needs”.
The report said one in three members of the health board’s staff are over 50, leaving the workforce “totally exhausted” and making for a high level of turnover.
A&E consultant Catharina Hartman told STV the pressure in the hospital is having an impact on medics and how they view themselves.
“We constantly feel like we are never enough,” she said. “We’re never going to get to that point where we feel like we’ve done a good job.”
She added: “When you come to work and it is always difficult, it gets demoralising.
“People start feeling like they have no impact when they come to work.”
Dr Hartman said the staff have never experienced patients “booing and slow clapping” in the waiting room – and that these are “difficult things to cope with”.
What is A&E for?
Reflecting on the reaction in waiting rooms, Dr Hartman said we all need to accept that we need to be more patient in these difficult times at ARI.
She said people need to manage expectations of the service the hospital can deliver: “Do we have a National Health Service that is the pinnacle of health services? We don’t have funding for the pinnacle of health services.
“Why is there still an expectation that is what we can deliver? It’s this mismatch of what we are able to do and what the expectation is.”
NHS Grampian is trying to help ease the pressure by enabling ambulance paramedics to call clinicians and check if A&E is the best place for their patient. This means unnecessary waits are reduced along with the chances of ambulances queuing up outside A&E.
The public is urged to play their part in managing wait times too, by only going to A&E if there is a genuine emergency.
In all other situations, the first ports of call should be GPs, NHS inform, 111 and pharmacies.
Conversation