Labour parliamentary candidate Patrick Hurley suffered a potentially life threatening burst appendix earlier this month and experienced first hand the overwhelming demand on the Accident & Emergency department. Thankfully Patrick has now fully recovered following treatment on the NHS.

Qocal asked Patrick to describe his experience in his own words.

I’m hoping to be Southport’s MP after the General Election, after the local Labour Party chose me last year to be their candidate. As someone with a strong belief in public services, you may expect me to make an argument in favour of the NHS, but I want to let you know from my own personal perspective just why I think the NHS is the best of us, and just how valuable it is to our country.

On 2nd April, I was out in Southport, as I am most evenings, knocking on local residents’ doors, and asking them to put their trust in me at the election. I’d not felt well all day, truth be told - I’d felt a bit queasy the night before, and had woken up on the morning feeling bloated and with indigestion, and I’d been in pain on and off all day - but I’m not the sort of person who’ll stop work just because of a bit of an upset stomach, so me and my volunteers went on with the canvassing session as arranged.

After about twenty minutes out on the new estate in Kew, though, I just couldn’t carry on. The pain was getting too much, and I collapsed on the pavement, unable to even continue walking, never mind continue campaigning. My wife was with me, so I asked her to drive me home so I could lie down for a bit. Instead, and for this I’ll never be able to repay her, she drove me to Accident and Emergency at the hospital. She’d recognised that it wasn’t just indigestion, but was actually my appendix that was the problem.

I got to A&E at 6pm, and the sign on the wall advised that the waiting time to be seen was between nine and ten hours. I’d now been symptomatic for 20 hours, and a quick search on google was showing me that an inflamed appendix can burst after 24 hours of symptoms, leading to up to a 5% chance of death. So it’s not over-the-top to say that the longer I was waiting, the greater the chance of dying. It turned out that my appendix had indeed burst inside me, and so the longer I was waiting to be operated on, the greater the chance of a worse outcome.

The underfunding of the NHS is not news to anyone, and I’ve made it one of my campaign priorities to reduce waiting times, but when it hits you personally, you get to realise the shocking state of the service first-hand. I’ve nothing but praise for the staff who saw to me, both in the emergency room, on the ward and also in the operating theatre. But the conditions they are working under are intolerable.

There were about 50 or 60 people ahead of me in the emergency queue, and the doctors and nurses were stretched beyond belief. I was lucky because I only ended up waiting seven hours to be seen, due to the severity of my condition, but when I was finally wheeled off to a ward at 1am, there were people still in the waiting room who’d been saying they’d been waiting to be seen since lunchtime. This is no way to run a health service in a prosperous country.

A lot of argumentative heat gets generated when people talk about political issues online, but the fundamental issue is that politics matters. The strategy set by the Health Secretary matters. The funding set by the Chancellor matters. The people appointed by them to run the NHS need to be the best people. And the number of frontline doctors and nurses, with the right training, matters.

If we get the wrong people at the top, with the wrong priorities, and the wrong approach, then we get outcomes like I witnessed. Emergency cases are left waiting until the middle of night to be seen by overworked, overtired staff, all while those people in government making the wrong decisions can afford to opt-out and seek private treatment instead.

I’m lucky. I got seen to just in time. I only had to spend three nights in hospital, and take a couple of weeks off work. I’m pretty much back to full health now, with only a little scar on my stomach to tell the tale. But imagine another 4 or 5 years of underfunding for hospital treatments, imagine another cohort of doctors deciding to leave the health service because of the conditions.

Like I say, I was lucky. But if the same happens to you in a few years time, the same level of service might no longer be available. If we want better public services, then we need to stand up and be counted, and vote for them.

Glad you're feeling better.

Now, do you really think a Labour government will make any difference to the waiting times, I know I don't.
Until we get rid of the pencil pushers and utilise the money the hospital recieves in a better way, things won't change...

Just look at the state of the NHS and waiting times in Wales. Labour have been running that for years and it gets worse year on year. Not holding my breath they'd do any better in England.

Does our prospective MP know which party he is standing for?

Wes Streeting has been very clear;

Wes Streeting: NHS won’t get any extra cash from Labour without major surgery.


Wes Streeting has warned that the NHS will get no extra funding from Labour without “major surgery” or reform, including more use of the private sector.

The shadow health secretary insisted he would not be put off by “middle-class lefties” who cry “betrayal” over using the private sector to bring down waiting lists – adding he was “up for the fight” with NHS unions.

It is the latest in a series of bold statements about the health service by Mr Streeting, who said Labour will only give the NHS an extra £1bn pounds if medics work weekends to ensure more patients are seen.



£1 Billion ? The commissioning budget for 2023/24 is £168.8 billion.