NHS Staff work through overcrowding and increasing pressure, but still go above and beyond for their patients

7 April 2025, 17:59

Spending a day on the front line of the NHS in the West Midlands, I expected to be shocked by ambulances waiting for hours with patients outside the hospital and for beds in corridors, but what I didn’t expect was to find out that staff are giving clothes off their own backs to keep the system moving.

Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield is a busy small hospital serving around half a million patients from Birmingham, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Walsall, Solihull, Wolverhampton, and that mixture plays its part in why there are regularly more than 18 Ambulances queuing outside. The number of people walking into the department is also double that, some of which are more poorly than those on the ambulances.

Emma Cowley is the matron in the Emergency Department, she admits it takes a special kind of person to deal with the relentless pressure. She told me it’s hard coming back into work some days and seeing patients still waiting from her previous shift: "that could be my grandparent sitting in the waiting area … I think of my family in all these situations all the time. I’d be proud of the care they received I wouldn’t be proud of the length of time they are staying."

She pointed out the lack of privacy and dignity given to an elderly patient in a hospital gown sleeping in the corridor in the centre of the department. She said they currently have 3 patients in corridor beds which should be their maximum, but admitted they regularly have up to six or seven waiting for a side room or a bed on a ward.

Next stop was Ward 7 - the hospital’s dedicated Winter Pressures ward. Despite the clocks going forward and Birmingham being warmer than Ibiza, it was still full during my visit in early April.

That’s where I met Sarah Baldwin the senior ward sister: "We look at getting through this winter period, we dig deep, and we work hard for that period hoping that it will come to an end.. but it just hasn’t quite finished yet."

Sarah used to work in the military before joining the NHS and told me it was good preparation for the job. Two of her patients on the ward of around twenty have been medically fit for around two months but couldn’t leave because her team couldn’t secure a proper care package for them and she didn’t want to send them away now, knowing that they would end up back in hospital.

Despite giving 100% on the ward, she also decided to set up a clothes bank, which has no shortage of women’s clothes because most of their items come out of the wardrobes of nurses at the hospitals.

"We were discharging a lot of patients home they didn’t even have any clothes to wear, especially in the winter if it was really cold,  if they’d been in an emergency they may have had blood on their clothes or end up just in a hospital gown."

Upstairs in the back office behind a full ward of stroke patients, I met discharge co-ordinator Luke Holland. He used his own interest in coding to create an app to help his colleagues navigate the postcode lottery of care and equipment available to patients when they leave hospital. He was keen to do whatever he could to help get them home to free up beds. He agreed that it was that commitment that keeps the NHS running.

"We do try and use our own personal skills and interests to improve the service... and I think because everybody wants to do the best by people we each try and put 110 percent in each day to deliver that in any way that we can."

Simon Jarvis is the hospital’s Executive Director and he says : "The pressures are there and our job is to ensure that our patients are safe and well cared for when they are with us. What would really help the situation is that integration with the community care so that we can discharge people effectively and efficiently when they are medically fit to do so. When we get emergencies here, people need to feel safe and assured that they are getting the very best care possible and that’s what we aspire to do at all times. It’s not easy but I think testament to our teams we do what we need to do to make sure that happens."

I have a new appreciation for the ingenuity and resilience of our NHS front line, the way they look out for each other and their patients even though ambulance car parks and corridor care have sadly become normal along with so called winter wards in spring.

Emma Reid is a Senior Broadcast Journalist in Global's Newsroom.

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