Patients have been urged to attend A&E alone as NHS hospitals grapple with high demand amid rising flu cases.
Several NHS trusts declared critical incidents due to “exceptionally high demands” in emergency departments, with a patient at one hospital forced to wait 50 hours to be admitted to a ward.
In England’s north, York and Scarborough hospitals asked for public support by asking patients to seek medical attention alone where possible.
Dr Ed Smith, deputy medical director at York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: “Our emergency departments are busy all year round but are exceptionally busy at the moment with a high volume of poorly patients attending.
We need your consent to load this Social Media content. We use a number of different Social Media outlets to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity.
“This means that the departments can often be overcrowded, with limited places to sit while waiting to be seen.
“While we understand it’s appropriate for a friend or family member to accompany with a child or as a carer for example, if patients can attend alone, this will help free up much-needed space for other patients.”
Dr Smith said local emergency departments were seeing more than 450 people a day, and staff were working in “challenging” circumstances.
Hospitals in Northamptonshire, Cornwall, Liverpool, Hampshire, Birmingham and Plymouth have declared critical incidents, which remained in place overnight on Tuesday.
At 10pm on Tuesday, South West Ambulance Service posted on X saying: “We know there are patients waiting for an ambulance, and we will get to them as soon as we can.”
Professor Sir Stephen Powis, the NHS medical director, told the Daily Telegraph: “Front-line NHS staff are under significant pressure and the demand is showing no signs of letting up, with latest data showing flu cases skyrocketed to around 5,000 a day in hospitals at the end of last year, and multiple trusts across the country declaring incidents to help them to manage additional strain on services.”
We need your consent to load this Social Media content. We use a number of different Social Media outlets to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity.
East Sussex Hospitals Trust announced on Tuesday it is temporarily limiting visiting to one visitor per patient per day to reduce the impact of flu.
“Exemptions apply to end-of-life care, our special care baby unit and when visiting children under 16,” a statement said.
“Additional visitors will be permitted on compassionate grounds on a case-by-case basis for all of our other services.
It comes after Health Secretary Wes Streeting said that he felt “emotional” hearing about long waits and patients being passed from ambulance to ambulance.
And the nation’s top emergency doctor told the PA news agency that the emergency care system is “overwhelmed” and this flu season is the “straw that is breaking the camel’s back”.
East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust also declared the first critical incident in its history due to a combination of “significant patient demand, pressure within local hospitals and flooding”.
Non-urgent patients have been warned they will face long waits in A&E and have been urged to “consider other options”, such as contacting their GP, visiting a pharmacy or calling NHS 111.
Speaking on LBC Radio, Mr Streeting said: “It breaks my heart because… I’ve seen this when I’ve been shadowing the ambulance service on ride outs – we are taking people in ambulances to emergency departments to die because then there isn’t the right care available at the right time in the right place, including end-of-life care.”
He said that sometimes hospitals are not accepting patients from ambulances “because emergency departments are saying: ‘Well, hang on a minute, we can’t take these people in right now.’”
But he said that was creating “intolerable patient risk” for the people that ambulances cannot reach when they are struck outside hospitals.
We need your consent to load this Social Media content. We use a number of different Social Media outlets to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity.
The minister pledged to do “everything I can” to “make sure that year-on-year, we see consistent improvement”, but he said that it will “take time”.
He said that the Government would publish an urgent and emergency reform plan “shortly”.
Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told PA: “This flu season is not an outlier, but the problem is our emergency care system is so overwhelmed and fragile that a normal flu season – which is what we’ve got at the moment – is creating severe operational difficulties.
“And it would be a mistake to think that this is solely a result of winter viruses. We have been chronically overloaded and overwhelmed for a number of years.
“It is a significant flu outbreak, but the problem is there’s just no capacity to deal with it. So it is really a straw that is breaking the camel’s back.”
Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust declared critical incidents on Tuesday morning, followed by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and NHS Northamptonshire Integrated Care Board on Tuesday afternoon.
(PA Graphics)
Meanwhile, the Royal Liverpool University Hospital remains in a critical incident state following an announcement by NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group on Monday evening.
Elsewhere, a critical incident declared by NHS Cornwall and Isles of Scilly on Friday continues.
A number of trusts posted on X to warn that their emergency departments were very busy, including Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust and Kingston and Richmond NHS Foundation Trust.