Hospitals should run at something like an 80% capacity. This allows safety and flexibility in the system. UK politicians have spent the past ten years talking

Hospitals should run at something like an 80% capacity. This allows safety and flexibility in the system. UK politicians have spent the past ten years talking about "efficiency savings" (meaning real term cuts), and so now the system is running normally at 90-95% capacity. And then you have something like COVID, combined with a bad flu season, combined with a bad respiratory illness season for young people, combined with a cold snap where councils didn't de-ice pavements, combined with Brexit meaning many staff have left, combined with years of defending of social care: All of these mean we have older, iller people in hospital, we can't get them out of acute hospital and into care / nursing homes because those don't exist anymore, we can't get them back to their own home with paid carers because all those staff left in Brexit. That means when someone is in ED and needs a bed there isn't one, and when someone is in an ambo and needs to get into ED they can't because there's no space, and when they're on the floor at home after a fall and need an ambo there are no ambos because they're all queueing at the ED. For years in England we've pushed risk onto ambo staff, and this year we've finally said acute hospitals have to share that risk, so we're seeing the inevitable results of over-crowding and over-full hospitals. And this is all entirely predictable and preventable - people have been describing FOR YEARS exactly what would happen and how it would happen and even when it would happen, and now it's happening. The blame lies squarely with a Conservative government that doesn't believe in tax funded public services and which has decided to cut as much as it can.