Like a grotesque mirror image of Advent, the NHS “winter crisis” has become an annual fixture — a painful reminder of the limitations of the health service, a litany of awful anecdotes and a ritual political controversy.
This year’s difficulties, however, are different. The overflowing morgues, the lengthening queues of ambulances, the A&E patient forced to wait 99 hours at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine warning that between 300 and 500 people are dying every week because of delays in urgent and emergency care — this is a system not only creaking at the joints but close to implosion.
