Greater Manchester A&E warns patients will wait ’40 hours’ for a bed

An A&E in Greater Manchester has warned that patients could face waits as long as forty hours as it struggles to cope with staffing and funding shortages.

The Accident and Emergency department at the Royal Bolton Hospital displayed a sign claiming there were ‘no beds/cubicles in A&E due to no movement’ last week.

The lengthy message was written on a whiteboard on Friday, July 22nd, at around 1am, giving frustrated patients an update on the status of the hospital’s emergency department.

The notice read: “There is currently a 40+ hour [wait] for a medical bed. There are six beds only left throughout the entire hospital.

Hamna Qureshi

“We have no beds/cubicles in A&E due to no movement. If you are waiting for a ward, you will be in our waiting room for numerous hours.

“If you require food, drink, medication or wish to leave, please go through to speak to medical staff.”

On waiting times to see a medic, the sign added: “Doctors 4-5 hours, minors 2-3 hours.”

Hamna Qureshi, thirty-two, was among the patients in Bolton‘s A&E on the night that sign was put up, with him the Manchester Evening News: “I was seen after two hours, then more tests, and sat for sixteen hours in A&E.

“No beds, no easy chairs, nothing at all, people were so ill that they couldn’t sit so they slept on the floor. One person sitting next to us came from Leigh and was told he was going to be admitted and needed to wait in A&E 40+ hours, as per the sign, before he could get a bed.

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“He asked if he could go home and come back the next morning and was told ‘it could be fatal to go home’ but no beds available.”

This comes just days after a new report showed the NHS is facing its ‘worst staffing crisis in history’, and could be posing a serious risk to patient health and welfare.

The report, produced by the Commons health and social care select committee and obtained by the BBC, found that England is currently short of 12,000 hospital doctors and more than 50,000 nurses and midwives.

If this staffing shortage isn’t rectified, plans to tackle the nationwide backlog of appointments and treatments caused by the Covid pandemic could be threatened.