Around half of accident and emergency departments across the UK are “full to bursting” under pressure from a so-called ‘quad-demic’ of respiratory infections.
Surging cases of covid, flu, Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and norovirus, known as the ‘winter vomiting bug’, are squeezing capacity in hospitals across the country, according to a poll from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM).
Dr Ian Higginson, the RCEM vice-president, told Sky News that the situation on the front line in the NHS was “pretty grim” this festive season.
He said half of hospitals had responded to polling and “all but two of them said that the emergency departments were absolutely full to bursting”.
Dr Higginson added: “Normally just before Christmas, we’d expect a bit of a lull. So I’m afraid things are looking pretty difficult out there for our patients and for our staff.”
“We simply don’t have enough beds in our hospitals for patients who are admitted as emergencies.
“We don’t have enough staff for those beds and we don’t have any headroom at all. So if something like flu hits as it has done, it makes a bad situation even worse.”
Backlog occurs in hospitals when patients treated by A&E departments cannot transfer to beds in the rest of the hospital. This happens for a variety of factors, including wards being slow to discharge healthy patients, and a lack of staffing and beds.
When surges in cases of disease happen every winter it adds to any existing problem a hospital may have in getting patients to “flow” from A&E to wards.
RCEM recently criticised “nonsensical” guidance from the Government on how to treat patients in corridors. The body described the advice as “out of touch” and “normalising dangerous”.
By treating patients on corridors hospitals can appear to be dealing with a backlog, without addressing the problem of extra beds being needed, or discharge rates.
Dr Higginson added: “In England alone, we reckon we’re about 10,000 beds short in our hospitals to deal with the predictable, urgent and emergency care… the equivalent of approximately two wards in every hospital.”
The RCEM vice president continued that social care was “in a really difficult place at the moment” meaning that when older people are “ready to leave hospital, they get stuck in hospital, and that contributes to that shortage of beds even more.”
