Having spent most of Saturday in two hospital A&E departments, a number of things struck me:

1. When I used to go years ago you could see why people were there - broken limbs, blood eveywhere, etc. Nowadays, they are jam packed but not with that sort of case.
2. Mrs Dally thinks it's because doctors no longer do out of hours work and so people with minor ailments go to A&E.
3. White, middle class British types are under-represented - presumably because they are risk-averse, play by the rules, etc.
4. On Saturday evening the place we were at was rammed and Mrs D counted only 8 white people, 5 of whom were Polish. None of the staff were white and English. The one white nurse was Irish, all other nurses / doctors were from ethnic "minorities" (sic).
5. Many self-inflicted case - men dangerously drunk at 2.00pm, and vomitting, for example.

all tanned from holidays abroad?

Your point?

Why were you counting the colour of people and were the apparent "Poles" wearing national costume or showing you their ID papers?

From points 1 and 2, I see you are a medical man

I wasn't, Mrs D was.

Why?

1 - Less manual labour I guess, H&S at work being improved drastically
2 - They do, just in established out of hours drop in centres
3 - The Daily Mail reckons it's because there are very few left
4 - Rammed with darkies and immigrants eh, must have been hell. Did you call the Daily Mail?
5 - These cases will always happen and may not be self inflicted. If you punch a dangerously drunk man and rupture his liver, is he there because he was dangerously drunk or because you punched him? Chicken and egg stuff.

My experience of A&E departments is that they do the job they are there for if you really need it. If you aren't life threatening you wait a mandatory 2 hours. I'm not sure if this is a deterrent, laziness (Which there is unquestionably a lot of in the NHS despite them doing a sterling job on the whole) or inefficiency, but it needs to be improved.

Why did you visit 2 different A&E departments?

My point is, why is there a disproportionate, apparent misuse of A&E by some people? Perhaps they can't be bothered making doctor's appointments? Maybe it's because doctor's appointments are often hard to come by? Surely, A&E should be used appropriately and by people in real need and not just as a means of queue jumping? Perhaps there should be a charge made for persistent abusers of the system, drugs, and alcohol? There are some serious issues in all this, not least just how depraved our society is.

No idea. Boredom. Shock at how out country has changed. Who knows?

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[size=200DALLY WAIL[/size

DALLY IN A SL@G THE NHS OFF SHOCKER!!!

So, H&S was trying to avoid accident prevention – to Dally; and A&E was, for him, an 'unpleasant' place to be ...

The plot thickens.

Mrs D took junior back to school today. One of the nurses was horrified by the incompetence of the two hospitals. Hospital 1 stuck a dressing on with the wrong tape but worse hospital 2's Max-Fac specialist put a dry rather than wet dressing on the wound (against what hospital 1 had previously got right). In consquence, school took half an hour to carefully remove the dressing that had stuck to the wound, whilst junior was screaming in pain. As Mr Max-Fac wants junior to go back a week to day, he'll no doubt get a piece of Mrs D's mind!