NHS staff have been coming into work voluntarily and unpaid to help their hospitals cope with extreme winter pressures, MPs were told today, as the country’s top emergency doctor warned over a dramatic increase in A&E visits. Dr Clifford Mann, president of the College of Emergency Medicine, said that the additional patients coming to A&E this year could fill “eight or nine extra emergency departments”. MPs on the Health Select Committee were taking evidence yesterday on accident and emergency services in England, in response to a string of major incidents declared at hospitals throughout the country last week, as A&E waiting times rose to their highest levels in a decade. Official figures show that there were 14.6 million A&E attendances in England in 2014, an increase of 446,049 on 2013. The demand placed on hospitals has been such that doctors, nurses and managers have worked overtime and even come into work voluntarily and without pay to support colleagues. Jim Mackey, chief executive of Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, told MPs that spikes in pressure which would normally last a few days had persisted for several weeks. “The system had to work really, really hard to manage to get on top of that… We had some absolutely heroic shifts from clinicians and managers working round the clock, often coming in unpaid to do what they needed to do,” he said. The Labour MP and Health Committee member Valerie Vaz said she that she was concerned staff were “working in the NHS for nothing”. “Basically they’re volunteering and that’s what’s partly bringing the spikes [in pressure] down,” she said. “I hope the Department [of Health] will take that back.”
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 08:28:06 +0000
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