PATIENTS are being piled up, staff are overrun and Great Western Hospital is bursting at the seams, according to television presenter Jeremy Kyle.

The tabloid talk show host praised the dedication of doctors and nurses at Swindon’s leading hospital, but told of the difficulties his own family faced visiting the site last year.

In his column in The Sun on Saturday, the 49-year-old addressed the current crises in NHS hospitals across the nation and where the money being spent on it is being wasted.

He said: “This isn’t war-torn Syria I’m talking about, this is bloody Swindon!

“I’d love to say I don’t recognise the picture being painted of our paralysed NHS, but I do. I know it all too well.

“Not so long back my eldest daughter attended the Great Western Hospital in Swindon.

“It took them six attempts to get the right diagnosis and for four months we went back and forth to a place that seemed like it was bursting at the seams.

“Now, I can’t complain about the doctors and nurses we encountered – they were lovely and ultimately did a fantastic job. But even I could see that these brilliant, dedicated professionals were giving their all but struggling to make headway.

“They were overrun and overwhelmed and it was almost as if you could hear the system creaking. Patients were piling up left, right and centre, it was busy and noisy and the stress was etched on everyone’s faces.

“You would have thought they were dealing with a major one-off incident like a train crash but no, these were just regular days in the life of the Great Western.

“And this was before the winter choked off what little spare capacity any of our hospitals had in the warmer months.”

Dr Guy Rooney, Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s medical director, said: “We treat patients in order of clinical need and our priority is to provide safe and high quality care to each patient. Therefore with the current high demand, less urgent patients may be waiting longer than we would like.

“We are of course doing everything we can to treat patients in a timely manner. However we are caring for more and more people, often elderly and frail with multiple and very complex health needs, which only gets worse as it gets colder.”

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The comments came at the end of a week when NHS England released performance figures for its hospitals in the week ending January 4.

The Government expects 95 per cent of patients arriving at A&E to be seen within four hours, but GWH saw only 71.7 per cent of patients within that time frame, putting it firmly in the nation’s bottom quarter of performers. This means 443 patients waited more than four hours, 193 more than the previous week, and the first rise since the first week of December.

Attendance at A&E was up by 60 from the previous week to 1,568 for the week ending January 4, but 40 fewer patients were admitted from that department, at 502. Just four ambulances had to wait for more than 30 minutes to discharge their patients at A&E, far less than the national average of 37.2.

HELP EASE THE PRESSURE

  • Your local pharmacist can offer advice on minor illnesses, medicines and long term conditions and will tell you if you need to visit another healthcare service such as your GP
  • NHS 111 is also available for medical advice over the phone
  • Make sure you are registered with your local GP surgery
  • For minor injuries and illnesses Swindon Health Centre on Carfax Street is open from early until 7pm weekdays and 8pm weekends
  • For more urgent issues SEQOL’s Urgent Care Centre on the GWH site is open 24/7.
  • The Emergency Department is for critical or life-threatening situations where immediate medical attention is needed, such as chest pain or heavy loss of blood.
  • In a medical emergency call 999 and ask for the ambulance service.