A day in a busy A&E finds staff under pressure and trying hard to adapt to a new way of working.
The crisis in Britain's A&Es means treating patients in ambulances, a situation which would once have been unthinkable, has become commonplace.
The BBC's health correspondent for the North West Gill Dummigan went to Whiston Hospital in Merseyside to see how staff and patients are having to adapt.Trolley after trolley lined up along the corridor, each one with a patient lying on it and many with anxious relatives standing or sitting patiently next to them.
"We resisted that for a long time, because we didn't want to say that the corridor was actually a place, but we've had to do that.Staff are having to adapt to a different way of working, handing out regular hot meals to A&E patients, and a room is being turned into a temporary kitchen. "If you'd have told me 12 months ago, even six months ago, I'd be spending entire shifts out in a car park, I wouldn't have believed you," she says."I think we're all struggling with that".
He says some surgical wards are now two-thirds full of other patients, an exceptionally large number of them with flu."These patients are so poorly, they must come into a surgical ward," he says.
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