They can't even treat a badly burned child

One victim of the hospital crisis is a two-year-old girl from Essex who suffered serious burns when she was scalded by bath water. She could not be given the treatment she needed immediately because of a lack of suitable beds.

MARK REYNOLDS details the various stages in the frantic search to find her proper medical care. It is a timetable which makes horrifying reading

Midday - the girl is having a bath at home but is accidentally scalded before the water has been cooled. * Minutes later, ambulance staff rush her to Southend General Hospital. * The child is found to have 30 to 40 per cent burns and advice is requested from the Broomfield burns unit at Chelmsford. * It is realised that the girl requires specialist dressings and advanced painkilling techniques and urgently needs to be found a bed at the Broomfield unit. The Broomfield unit is full and there is no immediate prospect of any beds becoming available there. * For three hours, a casualty officer from Southend Hospital frantically rings round to try to find the girl a bed at a specialist burns unit. Meanwhile, she is wrapped in cling-film and the best emergency care available is administered. * An air ambulance is put on standby to fly her to an appropriate hospital with a burns unit but is later stood down when no bed can be found. * Towards the end of the three hours, the youngster begins to develop an unusual spotty rash which indicates to doctors that an infection may have taken hold. * Because the girl may now be suffering from an infection, she can be given a paediatric bed and is immediately driven the 50 miles by ambulance to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London where there is just such a bed free for further treatment. * It is later found that she is not suffering from an infection and the next day she is finally transferred 35 miles to the Broomfield burns unit where a bed has become free. She then receives the essential treatment she needs. Gerry Lane, specialist consultant in the accident and emergency department at Southend General Hospital, said the case highlights the problems of casualty staff having to use time trying to free up beds rather than for treating patients. "It is obviously a very distressing situation when this happens. It was really very lucky that she developed spots so we could abort our search for a burns bed and just look for a paediatric bed," he said. "We had a casualty officer tied up for three hours on the phone trying to find a bed for her when he would normally have seen nine patients in that time. Unfortunately, waiting rooms are like conveyor belts - so when this happens, waiting times just become longer and longer." However, Dr Lane stressed that the case had been a rare one and that the trust in Southend had not experienced anywhere near the levels of crisis as some hospitals in London. "We have eight trolleys in the A&E department here for seeing patients and we have to keep patients moving through at a rapid rate. However, unfortunately, if one patient stays on the trolley, as in this case, then the whole system packs up," Dr Lane added.

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