HWN wrote:

My wife is awaiting a back operation. We live in Ceredigion but the op will be in Glamorgan. After being asked to get drive an hour and a half for pre-op bloods for an 8:00 am appointment, she did the sensible thing and arranged for the bloods and MRSA swabs to be taken at our local surgery. All good until this morning, when she was rung and asked to make the three hour round trip for another swab (on her birthday!). Despite being an RGN for the best part of forty years, they won't post the kit for a DIY swab. Glamorgan and Ceredigion differ with regard to this one swab. They won't even compromise on having the swab performed in a nearer hospital of the same health authority.

Health-care in Wales is . After breaking a hip, my mother-in-law recently waited near three hours for an ambulance. Because there were neither beds nor trollies, she sat in an ambulance for six hours (with the engine running as there are no electrical umbilicals at the hospital) alongside six or seven ambulances in the same situation. The paramedics dealt with this one case in their entire shift and the spare ambulance had to come from Llanelli to collect them to avoid them going over their hours. No wonder people use the magic words "the patient is going in and out of consciousness" to get the air ambulance. A friend of ours died recently after a heart attack after the 999 call-centre told his family they would have to drive him to hospital. En-route he had another heart attack but they couldn't access any of the [admittedly abundant] defibs because there was no 'phone signal to get the access code. The ambulances are only allowed to drive 20 mph over the speed limit (if they have the blue-lights on) so with the recent decrease in speed-limits, they can only drive 40 mph when they could previously have driven at 50 mph. But now the Senedd are discussing exempting buses from the 20 mph limits because the timetables don't work with the limited number of buses in the [nationalised] transport system! If Wales just did the opposite of what England does it would probably thrive.

Sounds awful and sorry to hear,but sadly all too common.

Im a volunteer search and rescue officer for the coastguard and if there is one thing i have learnt since joining is the sheer abbismal state Mark 'Dopey' Drakeford has left the state of the welsh NHS service in
I have been to casualties where,if it wasnt for the amazing work of the (charity) Welsh air ambulance or the Coastguard rescue helicopter there is absolutly NO way they would have otherewise survived,mainly due to complete lack of resources.
Even blue light responders with Terchnician level training such as ourselves are not allowed to take anyone to hospital even though we are more than willing and able...its crazy!How many man hours alone could that save the NHS?
We litterally have to tell casualties families that they need to drive their injured loved ones to hospital as there are more often than not no ambulances available...normally because as mentioned.they are parked up outside A&E mental

Moo wrote:

Do they still send criminals to Australia?

Put me down for deportation, what with the price of flights.

  

pjm-84 wrote:

Power tool use by garages..... swapped out my lower ball joints on my VW T5 and was surprised to see swarf when extracting one of the bolts. Its had suspension work twice over the last 4years and removal and re bushing of the arms at the beginning of the year

Didn't quite register until I went to torque them up last night. The swarf one (first one I did) stripped at a little over 50nm.....VW require 90nm + 45degress. Autodoc notes 50nm, which seems low, hence the revisit

New steering knuckle is circa £450 to £560. Trying to work out if a helicoil insert will take the factory torque recommendations and or who supplies this part to VW....