'Winter will be a humanitarian crisis unless dangerous hospital bottleneck is solved', warn NHS medics

‘Winter is going to be a humanitarian crisis unless urgent action is taken’, fear senior NHS sources. The grave concerns come as the number of patients who are medically fit to go home, but cannot be discharged from hospital, are ‘higher than ever’ in one Greater Manchester hospital.

Patients have been facing months of severe delays to their discharge from hospital, primarily because of chronic shortages of staff and space in social care. The volume of patients medically well enough to go home but ‘stuck’ in hospital is now ‘more than in any other year - not by a few but double, triple what we would expect’, one source has told the Manchester Evening News .

Medics from across the NHS have sounded alarm bells that overcrowded A&Es, long ambulance wait times, and a serious scarcity of ward beds have plagued the summer months. If the NHS is already in a ‘mid-winter position in August’ - the time the NHS is supposed to recover - ‘it does not bode well for winter’, warns another doctor.

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The number of patients facing delays to their discharge, including those medically well enough to go home or into a care home, has been hovering at around 1,000 in Greater Manchester for months - around one-fifth of all of the region’s hospital beds.

However, throughout last month, the numbers approached as high as 1,500 a number of times across Greater Manchester hospitals. As of July 31, the most recent figures published by the NHS, some 1,277 patients ‘no longer met the criteria to reside’ in hospital. The figure dipped to 972 by the end of the evening as some patients are discharged after 5pm.

On June 30, the