Bromley which is a suburb of London in the London Borough of Bromley in the South Eastern part of the Capital is not exactly either the wild west or significantly economically deprived or wracked with social problems. According to Wikipedia in 2018 it had one of the highest gross disposable incomes in the UK. It should be a pleasant well run place with efficient and well run public services such as healthcare, but it doesn’t. Bromley’s healthcare is provided by the National Health Service a nationalised industry that, like nearly all nationalised industries, fails to properly serve the people it is supposed to serve.
I’ve recently seen an account of someone having to use Bromley Hospital and I must say that going by the description it appears that Bromley Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Department seems positively apocalyptic. Here’s the story I’ve seen on the X platform:
What this person has suffered because the NHS cannot provide the service they are paid for and supposed to provide is truly awful. They’ve had excessively long waits to be seen and treated by medical staff, they’ve had to share a drip stand with another patient in a semi-public area and still has not had their conditions properly assessed or treated. Others have quite rightly got pissed off with the poor treatment and have, probably because of their frustration with the piss poor service the NHS is giving them, have kicked off.
If this was a one off situation then it would be bad enough but we have hospitals treating patients in open public areas and corridors up and down the country. Of course not every hospital and not every visit would be like what the commenters contact has experienced but this sort of crap service is far too common.
We deserve better for our tax money than what we get from the National Health Service. Some of it is excellent, some of it is mediocre and some of it is bloody awful. It not consistent in the quality of service that it provides and it really should be.
People arriving at A and E are often stressed and frightened because of the reason they are attending in the first place. They should not have to be faced with being treated like dirt, made to wait excessively or be treated in ways that are undignified. They certainly should not have to deal with a hospital environment that looks like something from some disaster movie.