Victoria Macdonald, Health and Social Care Editor at Channel 4 News returned to Queen’s Hospital on Thursday 11 July as our new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, began to set his priorities for the NHS. You can watch the report on the Channel 4 website.

She spoke to staff including A&E consultant Ignatius Postma, and A&E matron Marianne Govinden (pictured above right with Victoria) about the pressure they are under on a day when several patients were being cared for on our corridors.

Ignatius explained that patients in corridors are cared for on beds not trollies, the same way they would be anywhere else in the department. He added:

If we’ve got lots of sick people in the department the flow (how patients move through the hospital) slows down and if this happens in A&E, even if we’ve seen all the patients, everything slows down because we simply don’t have space to work.

The A&E at Queen’s Hospital was built to accommodate around 300 patients a day, whereas we now see double that every day on average. This is why we’ve begun discussions to secure the estimated £35m we will need to redesign the department to run more effectively.

Our teams have worked extremely hard to reduce waits for emergency care – our June performance against the four-hour target was 79.4%, the fourth best in London; previously we were at the bottom for London trusts. This is despite us seeing almost 100 additional patients every day.

Our continued focus remains on those who are still waiting too long.

On the new government’s ambitions to focus more on care in the community, our Chief Executive Matthew Trainer, said:

We have to recognise that acute trusts are going to have to do more with the resources they’ve got to run more effectively and productively.

We could put more beds, more space and more capacity in, but in the longer term that’s not going to help the population get healthier and stay away from hospitals.

Channel 4 News previously visited Queen’s Hospital in January this year where they reported on our Trust being the most improved in the country at reducing waits for emergency care for the most seriously ill (Type 1) patients.