British people who are desperate to avoid long waits in A&E are resorting to treating their own wounds and prescribing themselves medication, a poll has found.
Across the UK, the percentage of people facing long waits for NHS treatment is far beyond the targets set by governments.
In Wales, more than a fifth of patients (22.5%) in consultant-led specialisms had been waiting more than 12 months for treatment at the beginning of June.
The new poll, commissioned by the Liberal Democrats, lays bare the lengths people are going to as they try to avoid the lengthy waits.
It suggests a quarter of UK adults have decided not to go to A&E in the past two years due to waiting times.
Almost one in five (18%) of those people admitted actively ignoring the advice of their GP or NHS 111 services, who had told them they should go to a hospital.
One in ten of them said they had used homemade slings for their arms, while 31% had treated wounds themselves and 32% had prescribed their own medication.
Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: ‘Nobody should ignore medical advice to go to A&E but the fact that so many are choosing to take urgent medical care into their own hands shows just how badly the previous Conservative government ran our NHS into the ground.
‘From home-made slings to the self-care of wounds, Conservative ministers have left behind an epidemic of DIY A&E.
‘There’s no time to waste: the new government must bring forward a plan to prevent a winter A&E waiting times crisis.’
While the NHS in England – which was run by Conservative governments for 14 years until Labour’s election victory last month – is struggling, the health service is also failing to meet targets in other parts of the UK run by different parties.
A Conservative Party spokesman said: ‘In government, we boosted NHS funding by over a third in real terms, increasing total funding to £165 billion, and recruited records numbers of doctors and nurses, allowing the NHS to recover from the pandemic and waiting lists to fall at their fastest rate in a decade.
‘Whilst we put record sums into the NHS, the Labour-run Government in Wales has overseen Welsh NHS funding fall, meaning waiting lists are at a record high and ambulance response times are at record lows.’
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: ‘We inherited a broken NHS and it is unacceptable that so many people are waiting longer than needed for care.
‘It is our mission to get the health service back on its feet and build an NHS fit for the future.
‘We know that waiting lists are too high, and it is one of the reasons the Health and Social Care Secretary ordered a full independent investigation into the state of the NHS to lay bare the scale of the problem.’
They added: ‘We will tackle head on the biggest issues gripping the NHS by delivering an extra 40,000 appointments every week and by fixing primary care services to treat patients before they reach A&E, starting by hiring an extra 1,000 GPs with £82 million in extra funding.’
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