A nurse working in an emergency department has described the "intense and unrelenting" pressures on Northern Ireland's healthcare system as a "warzone."
Danny Donnelly is an East Antrim MLA for the Alliance Party, but has been working shifts as a nurse in A&E for the past 15 years, and works a few shifts per month to keep up his nursing registration.
Working on Bank Holiday Monday, January 2, he said staff were treating patients on chairs and trolleys, as all stalls and areas in the emergency department were full.
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He said patients who arrived to A&E in ambulances were being treated in them by paramedics, many of whom spent most of their shifts treating patients here due to an overcrowded emergency department.
In recent weeks, health trusts throughout Northern Ireland have been posting urgent calls for off-duty staff to work due to the extreme pressures on emergency departments.
Mr Donnelly said the current situation in the healthcare system is "unsustainable."
"It looks like a warzone. I've been doing shifts in A&E for about 15 years, and I've never seen it like that," he told Belfast Live.
"There's sick patients everywhere, there's very little room to even get about in the department. Every cubicle is full with patients, every trolley has a patient on it, every bed has a patient on it.
"The waiting room is full, there's ambulances stacked up outside. Wherever there's space, there's rows of patients on chairs with drips attached. It is quite unbelievable and very tough on the staff trying to provide care to their patients in that environment. "
Mr Donnelly said staff are under "intense pressure", with colleagues asking him to raise concerns about the situation with the Assembly's Health Committee. However, with no Executive currently in place, this is not possible.
He described the current situation as an "unprecedented crisis", and said the Assembly must get back up and running in order to address it.
"The trusts are doing all they can to try and cope with this, but this is a crisis. In my view, this is enough of a crisis to get the Assembly back together to address this. People are suffering unnecessarily," he added.
"As MLAs, we've been briefed by various groups representing specialties across the NHS that this is a crisis that has been coming for months. We've heard this again and again from various groups representing doctors and nurses, we've met with the trusts themselves and the ambulance service about pressures they're under.
"They all say this is an unprecedented crisis. The healthcare system as a whole across Northern Ireland is buckling, a couple of weeks ago Antrim A&E shut its doors for eight hours and told people not to come for any reason.
"That's unprecedented, that's a very scary thing to happen. The people in that area didn't have a functioning A&E in that time. We are seeing extreme level events."
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