'Every shift is a knife edge': How Omicron brought our NHS - and its staff - 'one admission away from disaster'

Lost patients, abandoned mothers, unsupervised students, dangerously unwell people left to roam the community.

It has not been the official picture during a pandemic in which politicians have repeatedly insisted the NHS could and would cope.

Accounts from frontline staff tell a different story, however. Their anonymous descriptions are not of ‘coping’, but of overstretched midwives fearing for the safety of pregnant mothers and newborn babies; of mental health professionals unable to section dangerously ill people due to an absence of beds; of nurses locking themselves away to weep; of potentially fatal breakdowns in communication as beds were frantically moved around.

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The Manchester Evening News has spoken to frontline staff across a range of specialisms, hospitals and trusts to find out what really went on in the NHS last month, how it felt, and what it means for the future.

Their accounts are those of a demoralised workforce. Virtually all said they feared - or knew for sure - that patients had been put in danger, but felt powerless to stop it.

Burned out and traumatised, many had either been too scared to speak up, or felt ignored when they did.

Over the past month the M.E.N. has spoken to more than a dozen doctors, nurses, administrative staff and technicians of all different levels of experience, across trusts covering the majority of Greater Manchester, in fields from mental health to midwifery to management, to find out what Omicron looked like from the frontline. We have also spoken to a small number of staff in trusts outside Greater Manchester, in order to compare.

What emerged was a story not only about the latest wave of Covid, but the ones before it - and, underneath it all, the chronic state