The NHS at mid-winter

The NHS at mid-winter With December and half of January behind us, how is the NHS faring this winter? According to the British Red Cross, the service is facing a ‘humanitarian crisis’, whereas according to the Prime Minister the current situation is ‘not unusual’, with much of the media coverage perhaps closer in tone to the British Red Cross than to the PM.
However, with performance data on A&E now published several weeks after events take place, it is less easy to tell how far undoubted signs of real stress in some trusts are a local issue, or are replicated across the rest of the country. Equally, even where national data is available on the state of the service (mainly through winter situation reports or SitReps) this does not necessarily tell us what has caused any problems and there are, in any case, data quality issues with SitReps that should be taken as a caveat on the numbers presented here. King's Fund