Doctors and senior hospital figures – as well as the official statistics – paint a bleak picture. But is there cause for hope?
Dr Nick Scriven can pinpoint the exact day he realised the NHS could no longer cope. “I first noticed it when I was on call on New Year’s Day 2012. We ran out of beds in our hospital. As a result medical patients had to occupy the beds in a surgical ward meant for people with broken bones waiting to have planned orthopaedic surgery.
“We’d always had ‘outliers’, the occasional medical patient who’d ended up in a surgical bed. But this was the first time cases like that had ended up taking over almost all the 30 beds on the orthopaedic ward. This went on for a month and was a massive stress for everyone as we’d never had to cope with this amount of patients being looked after elsewhere before.
