The harsh reality of underfunding at my hospital? Swept away for Johnson visit

I was one of the doctors who met Boris Johnson today. This was a highly staged press event in a newly refurbished hospital ward at Whipps Cross hospital where the prime minister met a few select members of staff and patients. This event completely brushed over the harsh realities of this chronically underfunded, understaffed and poorly resourced hospital.

The hospital is held together only by the hard work and dedication of its healthcare workers but it cannot be sustained for much longer under these pressures.

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I’m so glad that Omar Salem [the man who confronted the prime minister on Wednesday about the hospital’s care of his daughter] said the things he did. He was just telling the truth about what it is like to be on the receiving end of poor staffing levels and under-resourcing.

It was a shame some of the senior executives were trying to shut Salem up. But he got his point across effectively.

It just wasn’t true that there were no press there. It was all being filmed. It was very staged.

We were told yesterday that there was a special guest coming and nobody knew until this morning that it was Johnson. All the staff were lined up in a row in front of a team of camera crew and photographers. When I saw it was him I wanted to say something, but I didn’t want to lose my job.

I’ve been thinking about it all day and felt I had to say something because NHS hospitals today can be unsafe places. Whipps Cross [in Leytonstone, north-east London] is particularly understaffed and under-resourced so people don’t get the care that they need as promptly as they need.

And this visit was not reflective of the realities of working at this hospital. Johnson was taken to the nicest ward in the hospital; there were flowers on display and classical music was playing in the background. I wish the prime minister could have seen some of the other wards, which are nothing like what he saw today. He should come on a night shift and see how everything doesn’t function at two in the morning.

I’m disappointed with the care I can give patients. I work in acute adult medicine and I constantly feel that I am doing a disservice to patients and their families.

There aren’t enough computers and the ones we have got are very slow. So if you have a sick patient in the night you can often spend 20 minutes logging on to a computer. And then it can can take another 20 minutes trying to access the equipment and organise basic investigations.

Discharges and diagnosis are often delayed by people waiting for scans. Patients who are medically fit to discharge are waiting in the hospital for social services to kick in. They end up being there for weeks. And then they can get hospital-acquired pneumonia.

There are not enough staff on any level – nursing, physiotherapy, doctors. It is just chronically understaffed. The building is falling to pieces. It is either too cold or too hot. I could go on and on.

I love medicine, but you just can’t do your job properly. You don’t have time to talk to patients or families. Everybody is really demoralised. There’s no point in complaining because you know nothing will be done.

This is just what the NHS is like now.