For Queen’s Hospital, a beleaguered big-city hospital east of London, the past year has been a slow, but steady, campaign to cut back waiting times in its crowded emergency room. Then, on Wednesday, junior doctors walked off the job in England, triggering a cascade of canceled appointments and surgeries — a fresh obstacle for Queen’s, and for Britain’s crisis-ridden National Health Service. It comes at an especially perilous moment for the health service, when the flu, Covid-19 and other illnesses are filling up emergency rooms, outpatient clinics and medical facilities. At Queen’s Hospital, which is so overwhelmed that it sometimes parks incoming patients in hallways, senior doctors and nurses have managed to keep the emergency room running. But they have done so by canceling 1,044 surgeries and more than 14,000 other appointments and medical procedures elsewhere in the hospital.

Source: The Times January 03, 2024 19:37 UTC