Britain’s intensifying winter flu crisis is crippling hospitals with patients facing 50-hour waits as more trusts could declare critical incidents over the coming days.
At least 11 hospitals including in Birmingham, Liverpool, Hampshire and Cornwall have already raised the alarm amid severe strain on their services as the flu outbreak worsens and health leaders warn the NHS is facing ‘exceptionally high demand’.
Patients have been urged to attend A&E alone while some hospitals have restricted visitors amid calls for people to wear surgical masks to limit the spread of viruses amid the ‘quad-demic’ of flu, norovirus, respiratory illness and Covid affecting Brits.
The number of cases is already around double last year’s peak with around 5,000 beds a day taken up by patients infected with the virus – and officials expect the crisis to deepen this week as children return to school after the Christmas holiday.
Patients have endured long waits in A&E before finally being admitted to wards, while queues of ambulances up to 18 deep have formed outside hospitals as they wait hours to drop off arrivals, leaving them unable to respond to other 999 calls.
Critical incidents have been declared due to ‘exceptionally high demands’ in A&E units, with around 5,000 hospital beds in England occupied with patients with flu.
People have shared stories of long waits, with one woman tweeting a photo of beds at Royal Blackburn Hospital, saying: ‘Patients left out in cold corridors to be gawped at like exhibits in a zoo. No patient dignity and poor patient care. Shameful at best.’
Another wrote: ‘Currently in West Mid. Horrible place to be. My sister went into A&E last week and is now staying on a ward awaiting surgery. Took seven hours to get a bed whilst she was in severe agony. The noise on the ward, even at night, people playing music etc. Pure lack of consideration.’
And a third tweeted: ‘I spent 12 hours at Barnet UTC yesterday to not get any results, kept being pushed to the back of the queue…. can’t get in to my doctor’s to get a prescription so I’ll just let my pneumonia get worse and worse until I need to take up a bed in a hospital shall I?
York and Scarborough hospitals have asked for public support by asking patients to seek medical attention alone where possible.
Eleven hospitals are known to have declared a critical incident so far:
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.
‘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.’
North Bristol NHS Trust, which runs Southmead Hospital, urged both the public and staff to wear surgical face masks in its ’emergency zone’.
It said: ‘This is to reduce the risk of infection and to enhance the safety of all concerned.’
Meanwhile, East Sussex Hospitals Trust announced yesterday that 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.’
Hospitals in Northamptonshire, Cornwall, Liverpool, Hampshire, Birmingham and Plymouth have all declared critical incidents in recent days.
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’.
And ITV News reported this morning that more hospitals in England are expected to declare critical incidents.
Critical incidents can be declared when health and care services are so busy that special measures are needed to restore normal operations and keep patients safe.
Last week, NHS data revealed the number of people in hospital with flu in England was more than four times the level it was a month ago, with officials warning cases are ‘rising at a very concerning rate’.
It is expected that data released later this week will show another rise in the number of people admitted to hospital due to flu.
Today, Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive of NHS Providers, said working conditions for staff are ‘incredibly difficult’ owing to inadequate NHS buildings with not enough room for patients.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the NHS is under pressure and flu is currently 246 per cent higher than last year.
‘What we’re also seeing is this challenge of flow of patients through the system and increasing demand, which has led to these critical incidents being declared across a number of trusts, and uniquely, actually across ambulance services as well,’ she said. ‘We haven’t seen that before, which really speaks to that level of demand.’
Ms Cordery said staff across the NHS ‘are putting in absolutely valiant effort in order to keep patients safe’.
She added: ‘I think what we need to do is recognise that these are really long-standing challenges that the NHS is facing in terms of workforce, shortage of workforce, the critical need to reform and properly invest in social care, and also to think more about prevention…’
Hospital estates across the NHS ‘are no longer fit for purpose’, she said, adding: ‘That makes working conditions incredibly difficult, and it actually limits the available space often to treat people safely.’
However, she urged patients who are suffering a life-threatening emergency to still call 999.
‘We don’t want that situation where people are choosing not to call 999 when they really need it,’ she said.
Annie Farrell, a GP in south Liverpool and chairwoman of the Liverpool local medical committee representing GPs, said there is ‘increasing virus overload in patients, increasing frailty in our patients, the numbers of patients that aren’t able to self-care for these kinds of conditions is going up’.
She added: ‘For quite a while now, we know as a GP that if we feel somebody needs to go to hospital, we’re having to sit down with them and say we’re sentencing you to potentially over 24 hours in a plastic chair in a waiting room.
‘There will be care available – I know for a fact that our A&E department are doing their absolute best to manage everybody who is waiting for a bed in hospital in whatever circumstances they find themselves, so some of them are in backs of ambulances, and some of them are in the waiting area, but that’s what we’re faced with.’
NHS England’s national medical director, Professor Sir Stephen Powis, said: ‘Frontline 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.’
Yesterday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting said he feels ‘ashamed’ at the experiences of some patients in the NHS, admitting that some patients are being taken to hospital ‘to die’ because the right care is not available when they need it.
Mr Streeting said that he felt ’emotional’ hearing about long waits and patients being passed from ambulance to ambulance. He added that flu is a ‘big problem’ and was causing ‘extraordinary pressure’ in hospitals.
At least one patient at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital was forced to wait for more than two days in A&E amid ongoing pressure.
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.
Mr Streeting went on: ‘When I hear you describe an 88-year-old woman going from ambulance to ambulance to ambulance to ambulance, I felt the same emotional reaction I went felt when I was going around one of my local hospitals just before Christmas – when I went in, they said: ‘You are here on a fairly good day, it’s not too bad today.’
‘And as I was walking through the emergency department, I was looking at the corridor care that’s become a normal feature now in our hospitals, I went through a section of the emergency department where there were lots of frail elderly people, including people with dementia, who were very confused, very distressed, crying out, not so much in pain as much as confusion.
‘And as I walked around these conditions, I was looking around thinking: ‘This is a good day?”
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’.
‘In the meantime, I feel genuinely distressed and ashamed, actually, of some of the things that patients are experiencing and I know that the staff of the NHS and social care services feel the same, they go to work, they slog their guts out, and it’s very distressing for them seeing people in this condition as well,’ he said.
On flu, Mr Streeting added: ‘We’ve got this extraordinary pressure on flu where we’ve got between three and four times as many hospital beds taken up with flu cases this year than we did this time last year.
‘Even so, annual winter pressures should not lead to an annual winter crisis.’
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.
The nation’s top emergency doctor said that the emergency care system is ‘overwhelmed’ and this flu season is the ‘straw that is breaking the camel’s back’.
Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: ‘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 yesterday morning, followed by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and NHS Northamptonshire Integrated Care Board yesterday afternoon.
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.
The longest time one patient waited to be admitted to a ward at the hospital was 50 hours, it is understood.
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.
At 10pm yesterday, 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.’
They asked people to call again only if they no longer need help or if the patient’s condition has worsened while they are waiting for an ambulance to arrive.
Separately, virus experts have called on Beijing to disclose vital information about a worrying outbreak said to be overwhelming hospitals in China.
British authorities ‘need more information on the specific strain circulating’, known as human metapneumovirus (hMPV), to assess the threat to the public, warned Dr Andrew Catchpole.
It comes after cases of the respiratory infection – which has flu-like symptoms – were revealed to have doubled over the past month.
Currently, as many as one in 20 cases of respiratory infections could be due to the virus, according to the latest UK surveillance data.
Beijing has brushed aside footage of overcrowded waiting rooms and wards posted on social media saying respiratory infections are ‘less severe’ and ‘smaller in scale’ compared with last year. This has led to fears of similarities with the Covid outbreak in 2019, which was initially played down by China.
However, British experts have remarked that the scenes in Chinese hospitals appear little different to that of UK healthcare at this time of year.
Dr Catchpole, who is chief scientific officer at infectious disease testing firm hVIVO, said: ‘HMPV is usually detected in the winter periods but it does seem that the rates of serious infection may be higher in China than what we would expect in a normal year.
‘We need more information on the specific strain that is circulating to start to understand if this is the usual circulating strains or if the virus causing high infection rates in China has some differences.’
He added: ‘It is unclear just how high the numbers are or if issues are arising purely due to coinciding with high flu and Covid levels.’