With emergency departments overflowing, sick people need to be treated in the chairs they’re sitting in.
Others have had to wait in ambulances parked outside emergency units for hours before they could even be taken inside.
One such patient is Percy, who is in his 80s and experiencing liver failure. He came to hospital because he had been feeling sick and had lost weight over recent weeks.
Dr Arun Jeyakumar, a senior registrar on the ward, is one of the doctors sent out to check on patients like Percy.
Hopping into the ambulance, he has a brief consultation with him. He tells Percy that everything is being done to get him into the hospital.
Percy smiles back weakly, resigned to the wait.
The paramedic who brought him to the hospital is also resigned: he’s seen plenty of cases like Percy’s this season.
He turns up the heating in the back of the ambulance and sits down again as Dr Jeyakumar hops out and closes the doors.
Back in the emergency department, doctors, nurses and consultants discuss how to make space for new arrivals.
Beds are at an absolute premium in the hospital. So many patients have arrived that a room near the ambulance entrance has been set up for people considered “fit to sit”.
Every chair is occupied.
“It isn’t ideal,” one doctor says. “But it is safe.”
Porters have to wheel beds through this open space, between patients being treated in chairs and nurses kneeling on the floor to remove cannulas. Drip stands are shuffled back and forth to make room.
We see a nurse taking a patient, who is still attached to a drip, to the loo in a wheelchair.
She leaves the chair in the corridor and helps the patient in. A porter comes and goes to move the vacant wheelchair.
The nurse dashes back out. “That’s my wheelchair,” she cries.
We roll it back to her and she starts to laugh. “You can’t take your eye off them for a second or another patient will be in it,” she says – only half joking.
Elsewhere, Percy makes it from the ambulance to the emergency department, after a three hour wait.
“It’s getting worse,” he says, wincing as he closes his eyes – but it will be another 12 hours before Percy is admitted to a ward.
When we see him finally being moved, he is contorted in his bed from the pain, clutching onto a sick bowl.
