The NHS is under unsustainable pressure at every level, from GP surgeries to emergency wards, as delays to care, soaring demand and a workforce hit by sickness and burnout combine.
As ministers insist Britain must “live with Covid” and move on from the pandemic, on the front line of the health service the strain is greater than during the last wave of coronavirus.
Figures seen by The Independent indicate that the number of patients stuck in hospital beds despite being ready to go home is higher than ever before because of a lack of available care in the community, piling the pressure onto other parts of the system.
A crisis in ambulance services has led to waits as long as two and a half days, while doctors describe patients packed into wards without the resources to take care of them properly.
Ambulance leaders have warned that, by summer, services may be so stretched that they are unable to respond to even the most serious emergencies.
Across the country, NHS staff who have gone above and beyond for two years are still facing intolerable pressure, with no let-up in sight. Calls by NHS leaders to reintroduce masks were rejected by ministers. Andrew Goddard, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said that, while Covid patients themselves are not overwhelming the NHS, they have still accounted for a minimum of 3,650 beds over the past nine months – a need that had not previously existed.
He said: “The pressures on the system at the moment, I think, are unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and that is taking its toll.
“Not only are people off sick from Covid at the moment, but we’re now beginning to see people have issues with burnout and mental health problems. I think everybody is worried that the system is beginning to break. It’s been unrelenting for over two years now, and the system was hard-pressed before Covid, and it just feels like something bad is going to happen.”
As health leaders warned that patient care had already been compromised, The Independent found:
Labour condemned the “shocking” findings. Andrew Gwynne, shadow health minister, said: “The Conservative government must explain why standards for patients are being lowered instead of waiting times.”
Hospital chiefs across the country have warned that it is becoming more difficult to move patients out of hospitals and back home, with almost 20,000 patients being stuck on wards for more than three weeks by the end of April, according to internal NHS data.
The domino effect of full beds means longer waits in A&E, as emergency departments cannot admit patients, leaving ambulances to wait hours with patients outside departments. These “handover delays” are in turn keeping ambulances off the road, meaning they cannot get to patients who call 999.
An emergency care consultant in Leeds told The Independent: “It’s full, it’s absolutely full to the rafters, and everyone is just so very tired. Imagine elderly people in beds, rolled up like sardines without enough space to get between the beds, because we don’t have the physical space.”
Over the past five months, more patients have been forced to wait 12 hours for care in A&E than in the whole of the previous decade. The number has frequently been above 3,000 a day since the start of the year, reaching 3,500 on Wednesday 27 April – equating to one in 20 people who attended emergency departments across the country.
Analysis based on academics’ estimates of the impact of longer waiting times suggests that on Wednesday alone, this could have led to 48 additional deaths.
Patients waiting for scan results are unable to obtain them because of a rise in emergencies and fewer staff, says one radiologist
Dr Steve Black, a data scientist who carried out the analysis earlier this year, said: “The NHS once had less than 2 per cent of A&E patients waiting more than four hours. We know from our work that mortality rises with waits longer than five hours, so this many 12-hour waits is a catastrophe.”
Molly Newton took her father Mauris Dodson, 85, to A&E on 15 April after he suffered a fall. They arrived at York Teaching Hospital where he was X-rayed and told to wait in a small room packed with 30 people while a bed was found. “People were lying on the floor, people were bleeding, had drips in their arms,” said Ms Newton. “They’d received treatment, but had nowhere to go: frail, elderly, vulnerable people by themselves. I couldn’t understand how this had gone so badly wrong.”
Hours later, doctors told them to go home and return the next day rather than face an eight-hour wait. After Mr Dodson was sent home, doctors found they had missed a fracture in his pelvis – an intensely painful injury that had left him almost vomiting in pain.
Ms Dodson said: “The frontline staff are doing an incredibly challenging job in the most challenging of times. This is not their fault at all. This a result of systemic and chronic underfunding.”
40,000
nursing vacancies across the NHS
I am bewildered why the government would not want to know the facts
