Around half of A&E departments are “full to bursting” after a ‘quad-demic’ of respiratory infections heaps pressure on already stretched services, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has warned.
Dr Ian Higginson, its vice-president, has said that things were already looking “pretty grim” for the NHS on Christmas Eve. He said emergency departments “simply don’t have enough beds in our hospitals”.
The Royal College put a call-out to senior managers in the NHS on Friday night, with half responding.
Dr Higginson said that “all but two of them said that the emergency departments were absolutely full to bursting”.
He told Sky News: “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.”
NHS officials said in early December that hospitals in England were managing “record flu levels going into winter”. They said hospitals were facing a ‘quad-demic’, a term coined to describe the four conditions expected to heap additional pressure on services in the winter months.
These are flu, Covid-19, respiratory syncytial vicus and norovirus. Figures published the NHS last Thursday show that the number of people in hospital with flu in England had jumped 41 per cent in a week - and was more than four times the number at the same point last year.
Dr Higginson added: “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.
“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.”
He explained that due to the recent pressures “we’ve got patients all the way through our corridors because we can’t admit them to hospital when they need to.”
