Leona O’Neill: I’ve seen the A&E crisis up close – I’m angry but in awe of our health workers

It’s no surprise to anyone that our health service is under immense pressure at the moment.

I had been reading about it with a great sense of unease for weeks and scrolling past social media announcements that said A&E departments across Northern Ireland were overrun; to only to attend if it was an emergency.

Last week the news was full of terrible stories to illustrate how our health service is currently in a ‘perfect storm’, with lack of patient flow through hospitals, flu, and ambulances facing waits outside A&E departments.

So it was with a sense of horror that I listened to my elderly mother tell me of some dire symptoms she was having and that our GP had told her to immediately go to A&E.

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Over the next 24 hours, I was able to see exactly how much pressure our health service is under and how, despite the constant barrage of very sick people presenting with no let up, its workers were doing the impossible.

When we arrived at A&E it was early morning and wasn’t yet standing room only, but it was still very busy.

There were people with very bad chest problems, so much coughing, young children who were very sick, and a huge number of people who had fallen on the ice.

My Mum was seen very quickly by a triage nurse who was patient and kind and reassuring.

Over the next while, various tests were done with a variety of staff who were clearly extremely busy, but took time to explain everything that was happening.

Once it was established that my Mum was quite ill, things moved very quickly and she was given initial treatment on a chair as she awaited admission.

We sat there in a corner of the treatment area for hours on end, watching staff treat all kinds of emergencies. Every hour brought something different.

A patient was writhing and crying on the floor in pain in front of us as staff helped. A young child screamed hysterically. A patient sobbed, struggling with pain before the meds worked.

Nurses helped an elderly person walk to the bathroom, and calmed an inebriated person who was struggling to cope with whatever they were dealing with.

As the day went on, the treatment area got busier and busier.

I looked up the corridor we were sat in to people with bleeding heads, plaster casts on limbs, allergic reactions, suspected pneumonia. Elderly people, babies, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, all desperate for care, at their lowest ebb.

And the medical staff treated them all with such care, in the midst of chaos.

Doctors treated everyone with diligence and compassion. Nurses listened, they gave comfort, they whispered reassurance, they smiled, they put their arms around shoulders, they held hands, they kept people’s spirits up and made them feel they weren’t alone. There was good humour amidst the chaos.

I was absolutely in awe of their strength, determination and dedication as I sat there watching them navigate what can only be described as war zone conditions.

But, at near midnight, as I watched a medical professional rub her eyes, take a deep breath and head back out into the A&E waiting room to call in her next patient, what I also felt was huge anger.

Anger at the people who have let our health service get to a point that our most sick and vulnerable people are waiting on chairs for 12 hours or more for care, and that we are essentially relying on the determination of health workers to not let patients down and are pushing themselves to the limits to provide care.

The only reason the health service is still standing, still going, is because of those medical professionals who have taken a Hippocratic Oath to ‘first, do no harm’ and live that every single day, no matter what they face.

They are there for us in our darkest hours. We must fight for them when they get us back on our feet.

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