a&e is the gateway to the hospital. from here, patients need to be able to flow into wards and operating theatres to be treated. what happened to you? i fell over walking the dog. how long have you been here? since about 7 o clock last night. oh, my goodness, that s nearly. 14 hours. nick will be able to go home after he s seen the physio. but they ve looked after me fine, so can t fault this hospital at all. but 50 other people are still waiting to be moved out of the emergency department. anyone with a green arrowl by them is somebody who s ready to move to a ward. or ready to move out of the a&e. - there s a computer system showing the status of patients waiting here for a bed elsewhere in the hospital. so, you can see that - all of these patients here, they ve had their a&e treatment concluded, and they re waiting i for a bed somewhere else. that s a lot of green arrows, isn t it? the hospital s a bit like a hotel, and if somebody s not checked out of their room,
annette s waited nearly a year. her surgery was postponed twice because of covid. she s under the care of cardiac consultant nick matharu. so this is the dilemma that you ve got, people obviously in pain waiting months for surgery. that just wouldn t have happened before covid. absolutely. and it s also a case of having to constantly re evaluate whether these people have deteriorated, whether they ve now become more urgent in terms of priority and scheduling, and also balancing that across all of the other patients that might need it across the organisation, because there are patients waiting for their cancer surgery, patients waiting for all sorts of other cardiovascular procedures, which are potentially life or limb threatening. so how are you doing? still a slight little bit sore. oh, ok, well, just go easy. so you ve got some stairs to manage at home? yeah, but i don t. i mean, i ve paid for carers to come in to help me for three months. as well as my daughter and my son. so you ve