Super flu is pushing the NHS 'beyond catastrophe'

In an overrun A&E department, patients line corridors “packed in like sardines” as exhausted medics do their best to avoid falling victim to the “unprecedented” wave of super flu clogging up hospital beds.

- REBECCA THOMAS

Just two weeks before Christmas, top clinicians say this is the worst winter they have seen, with a “flu-nami” driving hospitals to the brink as services face a quadruple threat of winter bugs, an impending doctors’ strike, strict financial demands and patients stuck in hospital beds unable to be discharged into social care.

The sudden and “huge” influx of flu cases - up 55 per cent in the past week - has led health chiefs to fear that overcrowded hospitals will soon be unable to control the spread of infections, leaving vulnerable patients being treated for serious illnesses such as cancer, “terrified” they will catch it.

Dr Vicky Price, president of the Society of Acute Medicine, told The Independent: “It is truly shocking, it is the worst I’ve ever seen it... There are huge numbers of patients lodged in emergency departments, stuck in corridors, in waiting rooms and in inappropriate areas - all very unwell patients, and we’ve got high numbers of staff off sick with flu.

“It’s really concerning, and we have a lot of vulnerable patients, those on immunosuppressants, those who are getting cancer treatment, and they’re terrified to sit in the waiting room, with the systems under strain as it is, there’s nowhere to put these patients.

“We were in crisis anyway with the cold weather, and we noticed a real surge in flu.

“While the ongoing ‘flu-nami’ is being invoked as the primary cause of the crisis, this is a convenient scapegoat when the reality is that the situation is the direct result of a longstanding and predictable breakdown in NHS capacity and workforce shortages.”