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I want to pick apart this response to this photograph which shows 16 ambulances queuing outside The Royal London Hospital. That's one in thirty of London's entire ambulance fleet stuck in a queue outside one hospital. https://twitter.com/IanKelly31/status/1344651530327220225
On this day the wait for a 14 minute ambulance topped 400 minutes. That's over 6 and a half hours to get to a suspected heart attack, instead of 14 minutes
This hospital has just opened its THIRD intensive care unit, manned by spreading staff so thinly that the Trust has described ITSELF today as "no longer providing high standard critical care, because we cannot"
This is the London that I and many other doctors have never seen before. One adult bed available in the capital, patients being farmed out to Yorkshire to get to a critical care bed.
To be told by @iankelly31 that he would rather believe that all these ambulances are empty is upsetting. It should not be possible to twist human brains into a believing we would stop people getting to hospital in order to create the illusion that people are going to hospital.
The sheer doublethink required to look at this photo - from a current newspaper - not stock footage - and go "I refuse to believe this because I saw a tiktok of some nurses dancing" is in need of desperate and urgent research. People really are conning *themselves* with fantasy
Things have never been as bad as this. I've never known a hospital close its children's ward to make room for adult ITU before. But that has happened already at one North London Hospital. How much of a crisis do we need before people believe the truth?
I can understand people watching videos and being CONFUSED or reading articles and being UNNERVED. But it's as though everyone has just MADE UP THEIR MINDS one way or the other and NO AMOUNT OF TRUTH will persuade people to reconsider their opinions.
I have no reason to assume that @iankelly31 is joking, or stupid, or ill-informed or trolling, or unpleasant. But it scares me how common it is for people to be able freely to deny facts in front of their faces because a story plays a more comfortable narrative than the truth.
