Hospitals can’t discharge patients because councils don’t have the funds to facilitate care afterwards. It’s a perfect storm of neglect
Last Thursday, I spoke to a hospital doctor based in north-east England working in acute medicine, a catch-all term that takes in most conditions that present as emergencies, from heart attacks to kidney failure. I was put in touch with her by EveryDoctor, the advocacy group for medical professionals set up just before the pandemic. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she told me. “The corridors are crammed with people on trolleys, being nursed. Our A&E department is twice the size it was before the pandemic, but it’s just silted up with people who can’t get beds.”
What had tipped her hospital into crisis, she said, was a bad flu season and a sharp rise in respiratory viruses, coupled with deep systemic problems that had been festering for years. She explained her fears in the apparently unruffled tones of someone who regularly deals with matters of life and death, but what she said was full of foreboding, with a sense that a basic foundation of the social contract had fallen away. “I think most people would say that if they were really ill, when they got through the doors, they’d be as safe as they could be. It feels like that’s not the case now … There’s just too much jeopardy.”
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
