The president of the Society for Acute Medicine has warned that NHS pressures show no sign of abating and the system is becoming ‘increasingly compromised’.

Dr Tim Cooksley said patients were being put at risk due to overcrowding in hospitals and long handover delays preventing ambulances from getting back on the road. He said that staffing and capacity issues were the two ‘fundamental issues’ and ‘honest discussions’ were required to resolve them.

The Society for Acute Medicine deals with the immediate and early treatment of adult patients with a variety of medical conditions who present to hospital as emergencies. The speciality receives the majority of patients admitted from A&E and helps maintain the flow of patients through emergency departments to avoid exit block, the term used when patients cannot be moved into a hospital bed.

Cooksley said: “The NHS and social care continue to be under immense strain and the system is becoming increasingly compromised. Understandably, the government wants to focus on elective (non-urgent) recovery and move forward from Covid, but the strains on the ground make this seem a distant prospect currently. There will be no elective recovery without addressing urgent and emergency care.

“The reality is that we are seeing overcrowding in acute care settings with patient flow throughout the system impaired and patients stuck for long periods in emergency departments and acute medical units (AMUs) which results in worse patient outcomes.

“Due to this, paramedics are then stuck unable to transfer their patients into hospitals and get back on the road, resulting in 999 patients being left at home for longer periods without clinical assessment and treatment which potentially has a significant impact on their outcomes. These were problems that existed before Covid, however, they are now exacerbated by high staff absence levels, fatigue and low staff morale worsened by often not being able to deliver the standard of care they wish.”