Senior medics and NHS leaders warn about ‘unbearable’ pressure on the NHS following New Year and rising cases of flu and Covid. DAUK’s Dr Dolin Bhagawati spoke to i News about the bleak situation in national healthcare.
“Dr Dolin Bhagawati, from Doctors’ Association UK, told i News that patients across the UK are facing such long waits in A&E that people are leaving after several hours to try and find help at another hospital miles away.
“Patients are experiencing such long waits in A&E they are upping and leaving to try and get help at a different hospital, often several miles away, just so they can be seen in a timely fashion. This is a nationwide problem which needs a nationwide solution as we’ve reached a tipping point.”
When asked how this winter crisis compared to previous years, Dr Bhagawati said: “Literally every doctor I’ve met, no matter how experiences, has said they’ve never seen anything like this. We have issues with waits all the time in winter, but we don’t have clear up cupboards to make the space to see patients.
“In previous years we didn’t have hundreds of people dying because of the waits to see someone, as the RCEM president explained. On top of that we have a collection of issues coming to the surface: long-term such as funding, lack of social care options and waiting lists, then short-term with increases in cases of Covid, flu and other respiratory viruses.
“We now have long waits all over the place which is exacerbated by staff shortages meaning fewer healthcare professionals dealing with higher number of patients.”
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