Medical leaders have demanded that the government “get a grip” on the “intolerable” pressures facing NHS staff and services, amid warnings that hundreds of patients are dying unnecessarily each week because of delays in treatment.
Over a dozen NHS trusts and ambulance services across England declared critical incidents over the Christmas and New Year period, as rising cases of flu and covid exacerbated existing pressures from workforce shortages and lengthy hospital discharge delays.1
Declaring a critical incident enables trusts to temporarily scale back routine services if they deem that current demand is affecting their ability to deliver safe care to patients. Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust, which declared a critical incident on 30 December, said that doing so would allow it to redeploy staff to areas where they were most needed, to ask some staff to come back from annual leave to work, and to get extra support from elsewhere in the system. …