NHS crisis as ambulance crews driven demented - this paralysis must end

Imagine you have a vocation. Your work is a calling. You knew at the start you'd never be rich but your passion for helping other people overrode the desire for smart cars and luxury holidays. You realised the responsibility would be crushing - your decision could mean life or death - yet you bravely shouldered the burden.

You devoted yourself to the NHS because you believed with every fibre of your being the institution provided, free at the point of use, a level of care and medical excellence unparalleled in the world. You are a doctor, a nurse, a paramedic, a radio-grapher, and you have studied for years to achieve unimpeachable expertise. Yet, to your distress and bewilderment, you find yourself among the NHS staff taking more than 625,000 sick days for mental health in just one month.

Beleaguered workers are breaking under the pressure of trying to provide patients with Rolls-Royce care as the NHS buckles under a recruitment and retention crisis.

They describe making heroic efforts to maintain standards while one nurse does the job of three, bureaucracy and endless administration force them away from patients and the catastrophic failure of social care means beds are blocked with folk who would be far happier at home.

Ambulance crews are driven demented as they wait in their vehicles on hospital forecourts, frantically keeping the critically ill in their care alive for hour after hour until a space - often in a corridor - opens inside and the inmate can finally be admitted.

One paramedic told me: "All the time we are stuck, paralysed by the bed shortage, we hear urgent calls for ambulances going out on our ambulance radios.

"Our DNA is all about responding. Our mission is to do our utmost to save lives. We can't move. We can't do what we are qualified to do. It is playing havoc with our mental health."

Nurses talk of being so rushed off their feet they can't attend to the niceties of treating patients like people. Says one: "We want to stop and chat, comment on photos of grandchildren, ask if they've managed to eat breakfast. We hate to be curt and abrupt. We have no choice. At the end of a long shift, we feel as if we have short-changed our patients and ourselves.

"We get no thanks. No appreciation. Eventually, feeling as if you have let everyone - including yourself - down chips away at your morale. We are mentally and physically exhausted. It's unsustainable."

The NHS needs emergency triaging urgently. All that saucepan lid-banging in Covid is a fat lot of use in 2025.