NHS England is facing a “perfect winter storm” with 10 times more people hospitalized with flu than this time last year, and ambulances experienced deadly delays in getting to A&E with sick patients.
Last week there were an average of 344 patients a day in hospitals in England with flu, more than 10 times the number at the beginning of last December.
And up to three in 10 patients arriving at hospitals by ambulance are waiting at least 30 minutes to be handed over to A&E teams. Health chiefs say the crisis is leading to deaths.
The figures show that there were 22,883 delays of half an hour or more across all hospital trusts in the week to November 20. This represents 29% of the 79,076 ambulance arrivals. The proportion increased to 23% during winter 2021/22.
Figures on flu and ambulance delays were published by NHS England on Thursday and provided the first weekly snapshot of how hospitals are performing this season.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents the health system in England, said: “These figures really show how stretched services are already as we head into a perfect winter storm. A significantly higher number of people in hospital due to the flu compared to this time last year, along with the fact that Covid-19 has not gone away.”
The weekly NHS snapshot report also revealed that around 13% of ambulance deliveries last week, equivalent to 10,020 patients, were delayed by more than an hour.
Martin Flaherty, managing director of the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, said patients were suffering, being “forced to wait at the back of our ambulances, while our crews are stuck and therefore they cannot respond to patients who need us out in the community”.
He added: “The life-saving safety net provided by NHS ambulance services is being seriously compromised by these unnecessary delays, and patients are dying and suffering as a result every day.”
The figures are another sign of the pressures hospitals are facing, amid a record backlog of treatments and delays in discharging people who no longer need to be in hospital. An average of 13,179 beds per day last week were occupied by people ready to be discharged.
Professor Sir Stephen Powis, National Medical Director of NHS England, said: “The first weekly figures for this year show the considerable pressure facing staff ahead of what is likely to be the hardest winter difficult of the NHS.”
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Figures from NHS Digital also showed that the number of written complaints about primary care, from GPs and dental practices, rose by 39.4% to 120,064 in 2021-22, with communication, clinical treatment and the attitude, behavior or values of the staff, being the most frequent causes of problems about GP practices.
Louise Ansari, national director of Healthwatch England, said the figures “reflect the growing dissatisfaction that patients are reporting to us, particularly with access to GPs and dentists”.
GPs carried out a record number of appointments in England in October, with the highest proportion of patients seen face-to-face since the start of the pandemic, new figures show. More than seven in 10 people (71.3%) saw each other face-to-face, the highest proportion since the coronavirus epidemic began, although still below the pre-pandemic level of 80% .
However, separate figures from NHS Digital show that the number of full-time equivalent qualified permanent GPs has fallen year-on-year for the fifth consecutive month.