Winter pressures causing thousands of delays

Hospitals across England are to defer operations and procedures until 31 January as a result of overwhelming NHS pressures this winter.

NHS England has said that hospitals are being given the ‘time and space’ to manage the pressures that the new year brings, including cold-related illnesses such as the flu, and is allowing hospitals the ability to delay routine outpatient appointments to direct the necessary attention to emergency care.

Professor Keith Willett, director of acute care, reiterated that the NHS was reacting to concerns from doctors and nurses over a rise in flu incidents and that the delay of operations did not constitute a crisis.

He said: "With the incidents of flu rising in the community and in our hospitals, and the pressures that we always see in the first few weeks of January... that it's important we give the hospitals time and space to manage the demand that we anticipate will come through."

The NHS England panel, which has extended the deferral of all non-urgent inpatient elective care to free up capacity for our sickest patients to January 31, also reiterated that cancer operations and time-critical procedures should go ahead as planned.

The news coincides with Milton Keynes University Hospital informing patients to only attend hospital for emergency treatment as it was facing pressures resulting from ‘very high numbers of patients seeking emergency medical care’. To better handle the situation, the hospitals has opened an ‘unprecedented number of escalation [extra] beds’ and treating patients in the emergency department in order of clinical priority.