Around half of accident and emergency departments throughout the UK are “full to bursting” beneath stress from a so-called ‘quad-demic’ of respiratory infections.
Surging instances of covid, flu, Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and norovirus, generally known as the ‘winter vomiting bug’, are squeezing capability in hospitals throughout the nation, in line with a ballot from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM).
Dr Ian Higginson, the RCEM vice-president, informed Sky News that the state of affairs on the entrance line within the NHS was “pretty grim” this festive season.
He stated 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 do not have sufficient workers for these beds and we haven’t any headroom in any respect. So if one thing like flu hits because it has carried out, it makes a nasty state of affairs 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 “movement” 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 contact” and “normalising harmful”.
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 brief in our hospitals to cope with the predictable, pressing and emergency care… the equal of roughly two wards in each hospital.”
The RCEM vice president continued that social care was “in a very troublesome place in the intervening time” meaning that when older people are “prepared to depart hospital, they get caught in hospital, and that contributes to that scarcity of beds much more.”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1993216/warning-hospital-a-and-e-full-respiratory-virus-quademic