A day in the life at a major hospital as winter pressure bites

As data shows NHS England is failing to hit most of its performance targets and staff say being under-resourced and overworked is becoming the new normal.

ITV News Health Correspondent Rebecca Barry saw first-hand how staff and patients are coping with the pressures at the Royal Preston Hospital.

Like every hospital the length and breadth of the country, the Royal Preston in Lancashire is full.

I spent a day with staff and patients and found a system under ever-increasing pressure.

On an average day here, 900 patients are being cared for in the 1980s building.

But many are waiting too long for the treatment they need.

The pressure that winter brings - as well as repeated periods of strike action - is pushing staff and services to the limit.

The hospital’s front door is the emergency department.

There are 72 patients in the relatively small ward, with 38 waiting to be admitted to a ward upstairs. One patient had been waiting for 62 hours.

And the conveyor belt of ambulances pulling up outside never stops.

For Emergency Department Consultant, Dr Michael Stewart, the relentless strain is, sadly, becoming the norm.

“It’s very easy to get into Stockholm Syndrome really with this,” Dr Stewart tells me.

“By recent standards, we’re having a pretty good day. By the standards that we’d like to have the patients coming through the Emergency Department, it’s still pretty pressured and pretty bad,” he says.

Dr Stewart tells me it’s upsetting that he and his staff cannot deliver the ‘gold standard’ that they’d like for their patients.

And the situation at the Royal Preston is replicated across the country.

Figures published by NHS England today show that only 69% of patients in Emergency Departments were seen within four hours in December.

That’s a slight improvement on the same time last year - but still well below the long-standing target of 95%.

The problem faced by Emergency Departments is that hospital wards are packed full of patients who should be discharged into the community - but can't leave due to a lack of social care provision.

On an average day last week, more than 12,000 patients were in hospital despite being cleared for discharge.

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The respiratory ward at the Royal Preston is no different. A patient was successfully discharged on the morning I visited and, within minutes, the bed had already been filled.

Consultant Prof Mohammed Munavvar tells me that the winter months are particularly busy for his team as they bring a rise in flu - and complications for those with respiratory diseases.

“We are exceedingly busy, not surprisingly,” Prof Munavvar tells me.

He says that we’re going through the peak of the year for the conditions he treats.

But this year, industrial action by Junior Doctors has added to the pressure.

And it’s not just on the wards where you see the impact of these strikes. They’re evident in the operating theatres too, which are forced to close their doors to non-emergency procedures during periods of industrial action.

The Royal Preston has managed to reduce the number of those waiting for these procedures through the use of a dedicated surgical hub.

And across England, the surgical waiting list has fallen for the second month in a row.

But it still sits at 7.6 million.

There is a real fear among staff here that, with no let-up in the seasonal pressure - and the threat of more strikes - this winter could get worse still.

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