In Liverpool's packed Accident and Emergency departments, there are people lying in pain on waiting room floors. Elderly patients are held for days on trolleys in busy corridors and ambulances are queuing up outside for hours.
In those same hospitals, hundreds of medically fit people are waiting to leave wards. In some cases, it will be weeks before they can move on and free up badly needed beds for those waiting in the chaotic corridors below.
The images, videos and reports coming out of the region's emergency departments paint a painful and distressing image of the crisis that is currently engulfing the National Health Service. But it is those blocked-up beds elsewhere in the buildings and the frustrating stories behind them that perhaps tell the wider story of why we are in this existential mess.
