Osei-Mensah said that following the end of the pilot, she had actively avoided A&E due to “unbearable” previous experiences.<\/p>\n
“Just being in A&E can make the crisis worse,” she said.<\/p>\n
The 21-year-old added that she had previously waited up to 28 hours in an emergency department for medical care and had to repeatedly advocate for herself while in “excruciating pain”.<\/p>\n
Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) advise that a sickle cell crisis should be treated as “an acute medical emergency” and patients should receive pain relief within 30 minutes of presenting at hospital.<\/p>\n
Osei-Mensah said she had waited longer than 30 minutes just to be triaged at A&E.<\/p>\n
She said the emergency unit pilot meant she received pain relief much faster, but said there had been problems in how the scheme was communicated to patients.<\/p>\n
“I know for a fact that there’s a lot of sickle cell patients that didn’t know about the unit,” Osei-Mensah said.<\/p>\n
She said she was told about the unit through a group chat, not from the hospital directly, and only discovered that it was a trial when it was mentioned by a nurse during one of her visits.<\/p>\n
“If there had been more [patients], they might have thought to have kept it,” she added.<\/p>\n
Barts Trust did not respond to questions about how and when patients were informed about the pilot scheme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Osei-Mensah said that following the end of the pilot, she had actively avoided A&E due to “unbearable” previous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,137,500],"class_list":{"0":"post-489714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}