Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the Queen's Medical Centre and Nottingham City Hospital, declared a critical incident earlier this weekNHS Nottingham and Nottinghamshire said "extreme pressures" across the county's hospitals had led to the move so "coordinated additional steps" could be made to prioritise care.
She said: "This allows us to put measures in place to ensure that people can continue to safely access emergency services when they need them. Critical incidents may sound like a piece of NHS jargon and in many ways it is, but the grim reality is it's a sure sign of huge pressure on the NHS that prior to the pandemic was usually associated with the depths of winter.
There was an earlier system-wide alert across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire in July. This chimes with what NHS staff have been telling us for months that the strain on the health service is now year-round with a record backlog of people waiting for NHS treatments.