Gloucestershire NHS confident of discharging 140 patients due to ‘extreme winter pressure’

An NHS trust is preparing to cancel operations, urgently discharge 140 patients and limit admissions to cope with “extreme winter pressures”.

The Gloucestershire acute trust declared a ‘critical incident’ on Wednesday when hospitals in England asked patients seeking medical attention to come alone to reduce emergency department overcrowding.

Doctors and nurses should try to free up as many beds as possible in the hospitals the company runs in Gloucester and Cheltenham, doing what they can “where clinically appropriate to maximize the likelihood of discharge and minimize the need for admission”, it said the staff. in a circular.

The trust is also asking staff to wear surgical masks in many care areas in response to the UK flu surge, which a senior NHS doctor warned would not peak for another week or two.

The memo read: “Teams and divisions may need to cancel elective activities if this will reduce pressure on emergency routes or free up staff/other resources that will help reduce pressure. Today and tomorrow we will have to create more than 140 discharges.

“This will help prevent patients from staying in ambulances for extended periods of time (and) prevent our emergency department from becoming overloaded, which increases delays and poses increased risk… and will put pressure on our ITU (intensive care unit) capacity. ”

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, said the flu is putting “extraordinary pressure” on hospitals. South Warwickshire NHS also trusts declared a critical incident – ​​an admission it could not cope with – on Wednesday after Warwick hospital became so busy that bosses said only patients with life-threatening emergencies were allowed to attend.

Professor Julian Redhead, NHS England national clinical director for emergency care, said he feared things would get worse before they got better.

“The wards are now full and that pressure is flowing back into A&E departments, with patients being treated in environments not normally used for clinical care,” he told the PA news agency.

While there is “some evidence” that flu cases may be peaking, the return of schools this week could lead to increased transmission of the flu virus due to more social contact.

Redhead added: “It’s too early to say it has definitely peaked. I hope there will be a peak in the next one to two weeks.”

Helen Fernandes, an NHS doctor and chair of campaign group Doctors Association UK, said: “The NHS is at a breaking point. A large part of these are admissions due to flu and other respiratory diseases, which also cause staff to become ill. The flu seems particularly virulent this year and also seems to have arrived earlier and caused more problems than normal.

“My 99-year-old grandmother was taken to the hospital at 7am this morning with possible flu and pneumonia. She sits on a cart and has been told she will have to wait 21 hours before being seen and assessed. It can be a maximum of four hours.

“It’s the new normal. It’s exactly what you’d expect, given the generally overwhelmed state of the NHS. It’s not because the staff doesn’t work hard. It is because the entire system is so overloaded that even the weakest members of our community are experiencing these terrible wait times.”

Meanwhile, the West Midlands Ambulance Service said in an email to staff last week that delays in transferring patients to emergency staff at hospitals in the region reached an “unacceptable” record over Christmas and New Year.

The most hours ever were lost in a single day – 2,829 hours on December 30 – as crews were stuck in hospitals with patients they could not hand over because emergency staff were too busy to see them. The ambulance service as a whole also lost a record number of hours due to such delays in December: 53,219. And in the first nine months of 2024-2025, the country had already lost more hours to that problem (275,946) than in the entire previous year.

This “unwanted milestone” occurred “despite everything the trust has done to stabilize the situation,” including bringing fewer patients to hospital, the memo added.

“These monuments are absolutely the Christmas gift that none of us wanted to receive and it is clearly an unacceptable situation to have exceeded last year’s lost hours total with three months of the year still to go.