A nurse has been filmed warning patients at an overcrowded A&E department that they could be forced to wait up to 13 hours to see a doctor.
The video, which has racked up more than 1 million views, was filmed at Harlow A&E, run by Princess Alexandra hospital NHS trust in Essex, on Monday evening. The health secretary, Sajid Javid, has since said the footage is “not what anyone wants to see”.
The nurse can be heard telling people in the waiting room that there are already 170 patients in the department, with 90 more patients waiting to be seen at the time.
She tells the crowded room: “Our current wait time for a doctor is seven-and-a-half hours. I will estimate by the time I go home in the morning at 8 o’clock some of you will still be here waiting for a doctor because the waits will get up to 12 or 13 hours.
“There are currently no beds in the trust. We’re trying to make more space if we can but if people are admitted there’s a chance they’ll stay in A&E for the night.
“We will do our best to make you comfortable, we will do our best to look after you, but please don’t expect you will be going direct to a ward because that might not happen.”
She added that anyone feeling “particularly unwell” should speak to receptionists, and pleaded with relatives to go home as the department was “running out of space” while trying to maintain social distancing “as much as possible”.
After being shown the clip on BBC Breakfast, the health secretary said: “Of course that’s not a thing that anyone wants to see.”
He added: “Because of the impact of Covid … we know already from our NHS estimates, we think some 11 to 13 million people stayed away from the NHS because of the pandemic.
“Many of those people are coming forward, many of those to A&E, and we’re seeing very high levels of demand. That is a real challenge for the NHS across the system.”
The video was shared on Twitter by Gary Sitton, whose son-in-law visited the A&E department after a road accident. He said some patients “verbally abused” the nurse.
Sitton wrote: “This is PAH Harlow on the evening of June 6 2022. My son-in-law visited A&E after being involved in a RTA.
“He left in pain after hearing the nurse’s announcement. Others verbally abused her. This is our NHS on its knees after 12 years of underfunding.”
He added: “It’s a tragedy and I feel a mixture of sadness and anger. When I read a spokesperson for the PM promise a ‘Netflix’ NHS I decided it was time to drop a truth bomb on their bullshit.”
It was revealed last week that the NHS has lost almost 25,000 beds across the UK in the past decade.
A report by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine found that at least 13,000 more beds were urgently needed in order to tackle “unsafe” bed occupancy levels and “grim” waiting times.
Patients were increasingly “distressed” by long waiting times, the college said, as were NHS staff who faced mounting levels of burnout, exhaustion and moral injury.
In April, the West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts, which covers six hospitals in West Yorkshire and Harrogate, asked patients to attend their local A&E only in “genuine life-threatening situations”.
Stephanie Lawton, the chief operating officer at the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS trust, said: “We are currently experiencing extremely high demand for our emergency care services and have seen a significant increase in attendances in our emergency department.
“Our teams are working hard to assess and treat patients as quickly and effectively as possible to reduce delays, prioritising those in most clinical need.”
