Frances description of her experiences in A and E paints a grim picture of the state of our NHS.

My eighty two year old husband has some health issues at the moment, which he’s coping with really badly, because there’s a high fear factor. We don’t know really quite what’s the matter with him, but I suspect that it isn’t anything too terrible, apart from the sort of tinkering that one needs done when you’re eighty two years old.

However, again, he’s very fearful of what goes on, anyway. Saturday night, after – we’d been sitting quietly on Saturday night, just enjoying Strictly – and, he has been asked to monitor his blood pressure, so he did it at the normal time, only to find that it was through the roof. I should go back and tell you that on Saturday morning it was also through the roof, and when I say through the roof it was at the sort of point of: you need to talk to a doctor. So we did talk to 111 because I was so anxious about it, and that took quite a long time, and the doctor came back on the phone after we got through the triaging doo-dah, and he said, you know, you need to take it quiet, you’ll have to monitor that.

Anyway, by the time we’d got to sort of nine in the evening and things were looking bad again, I telephoned my son, and said, don’t know what to do, and the thing is, we’re both quite frightened by the height of this, and if we go to bed nobody’s going to sleep, so what do you think? And he looked it up on the internet and said I’m coming to get you, we’re going to A&E.

So, we went over to a hospital where they have the best stroke and heart facilities, and an A&E, and I thought that made sense, but of course you know where I live in the Brecon Beacons: everything is over a mountain. And this indeed was over a mountain, and down the other side into Merthyr Tydfil.

Anyway, we got to the hospital, got into A&E and booked him in. There were a lot of people in the waiting room, and a very tired looking doctor staggered out, and said: look everybody, we’re going to have a very very long and difficult night, you’ve got a twelve hour wait to see a doctor. So I thought: OK, it’s going to be a long one! But in any case he was triaged very quickly. Within the first hour, he was a) triaged and b) treated. He was given some medication to bring his blood pressure down, and then we were seated in the sort of chairs you get in any waiting room anywhere, they’re all sort of locked together, you’re side by side with all sorts of people. On Saturday night in Merthyr, it’s quite a rough town, and it was also Firework Night, so there were a lot of people who had had a little too much to drink, and there were people bleeding and crying and police everywhere, and it was just not a very pleasant atmosphere. And it was also exceedingly uncomfortable.

And, there’s my husband, who really should by this stage have been lying down somewhere, sitting bolt upright, having his treatment, and every couple of hours they would come out and recheck him, and it was all done in front of all these people who were all sitting there cheek by jowl. And this went on, and they said: well you won’t be waiting twelve hours, you’ll see the doctor at one provided we can get your blood pressure down. Well, they couldn’t get it down, so we stayed, and we stayed, and we sat there, and we sat there.

By nine o’clock in the morning we were taken to see the doctor, having sat bolt upright all night with no sleep. At this stage his blood pressure was still very high, so they said: we’re going to keep you in, so you’ll now have to wait to see the medical team. So, back to the waiting room, and the treatment went on all day long, to reduce his blood pressure, and the monitoring went on all day long. So I can’t fault that, but what I do fault is that the man should have been lying down. He should have been in a bed, not sitting bolt upright, cheek by jowl with everybody.

It was so uncomfortable, nobody got a wink of sleep. We then got quite peckish because we’d missed breakfast, and somebody said, if you don’t go to the café soon it closes, because it’s Sunday. Now, by this time I’d had a night with no sleep, very anxious myself, I just – I was at my wits’ end. And I asked another patient to take me to the café so we could buy some food. By the time we got to the café I didn’t know what everything was on the shelves, so she helped me to buy what I needed and took me back. And then we sat again. It was clear we were going to have a very, very long wait, so we eked out the food we had to last us the entire day and the evening; which was lucky, because we didn’t get home that night until ten o’clock.

You know, by that time the beds were full and they couldn’t keep him to monitor him. But his blood pressure still wasn’t down, so, you know. They eventually changed all his tablets and sent us home, and he has obviously had plenty of rest now and he’s having a quiet time, and his blood pressure is going to normalise, I should hope, over the next fortnight. But it was a most horrible experience, and a real indication of what it’s like in A&E. That was it.

So: how did that leave me feeling? I tell you, it took me over a week to pull myself back together.