NHS Crisis: Health service on verge of "total collapse", senior medics warn

The British Medical Association ballots open on Monday, with members widely expected to vote in favour of walk outs.

Yesterday, new figures showed ambulance waiting times outside A&E broke another record, while NHS England revealed it was discharging patients into hotel rooms, because so few social care beds were available.

Today, the Government will convene leading health and care figures to discuss performance, after the Prime Minister acknowledged patients were “not getting the care they deserve”.

Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said this amounted to: “the equivalent of the arsonists convening a forum with the fire brigade to put out the inferno they started.”

Should the BMA vote be successful, junior doctors - all those below consultant level - would walk out for three consecutive days in March, further jeopardising Rishi Sunak’s pledge to cut waiting lists in half by the end of the year.

Ambulance workers at Unite also announced yesterday they would be striking on January 23.

Dr Vassili Crispi is the co-chairman of the Yorkshire Regional Doctors Committee, and works at a hospital in West Yorkshire.

He said BMA members would be striking for their wages to be restored to 2008 levels, adjusted for inflation, because in real terms doctors have had cuts of 26 per cent since.

He said: “It is heart breaking. I don't think any of us had envisaged working in the NHS in the conditions that we’re in.

“The NHS is on its knees. We often talk about NHS crises, but we should be talking about total NHS collapse as it is at present.

“Our department has been filled to the brim with patients on trolleys, and patients being sat on chairs with just a blanket.

“Some of the patients I have seen the night before are still waiting in A&E by the time I start my shift the following the night.

“Very often my colleagues just want to crawl into a corner and cry because we never envisaged making the choices we are having to make.”

Speaking yesterday while visiting a school in London, Rishi Sunak said: “The NHS is obviously under enormous pressure as we recover from Covid and I have enormous admiration for all the people working incredibly hard in the NHS right now to help get us through that.

“We are supporting them with billions of pounds of extra funding but in particular this winter what we want to do is make sure we move people out of hospitals into social care, into communities – that is one of the most powerful ways we can ease some of the pressures on A&E departments and ambulances that are waiting too long.”

On a visit to a virtual ward yesterday, the Health Secretary Steve Barclay declined to say how safe the NHS currently is for patients.