Junior sister Alice Kenny was among staff discussing challenges they face when we welcomed BBC London’s health correspondent Karl Mercer to our A&E at Queen’s Hospital. He came to see how our staff were dealing with some of the worst pressures we’ve seen.

Our Chief Executive Matthew Trainer explained some of the reasons behind this including an increase in frail, elderly patients with respiratory illnesses including Covid-19 and flu.

He also explained how delays in discharging patients who are well enough to go home, such as waiting for care packages or care home places, can also impact on waiting times in A&E.

Matthew added: “We’re focusing on understanding what’s causing these delays. Some of that is down to us getting our processes quicker.

“We also need to understand why home care agencies can’t get staff to provide those packages of care; what can we do to fill more of the empty care home beds that can’t be staffed in areas around our hospital; and what can we do working with primary care so some people don’t need to come here in the first place.”

On an average day we have up to 140 patients ready to go home, and around half of those experience delays.

During his visit on Tuesday 10 January, Karl spoke to patients who had faced long waits, including Wendy and David and their son Ben.

David said: “Under the circumstances we’ve got no complaints at all. We can’t praise the staff enough.”

The extreme pressure we are under has meant some patients have been cared for in our A&E corridor. These patients are cared for on hospital beds, not trolleys or in the back of ambulances, and are seen regularly by doctors, nurses and therapists while we work to move them onto a ward as quickly as possible.

Junior sister Alice Kenny was one of our nurses caring for patients, including Lionel Baines, 88, in the corridor.

She said: “We like to look after patients as if they’re our family and can’t do that in the corridor.”

We’ve introduced a range of measures to improve delays in our A&E. We’re proactively moving patients out of A&E each hour and onto the relevant ward; we’ve opened a surgical assessment unit at Queen’s Hospital to take surgical patients out of A&E; and expanded our existing ‘same day emergency care’ service, which, as the name implies, allow people to be seen and treated on the same day which reduces waiting times and cut admissions.