NEW government funding to alleviate winter pressures on the NHS will not fix ailing A&E departments in the long-term, a senior medic has warned. 

Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) president Dr Adrian Boyle told MPs on the health and social care committee on Tuesday that while the new funds were welcome, they will do little to address the “serious structural problems” inside emergency departments.

The government announced earlier this month an extra £250 million to buy care home beds to ease pressure on the NHS.

“This is complex multifaceted problem,” Dr Boyle said. “We need to be realistic that just a little bit of money is not going to be a magic fix.”

The RCEM president said the key way to improve emergency services was to tackle “hideously high occupancy levels.” 

“We have the second lowest number of beds in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development].”

A&E departments are going to take a long time to recover, he said, adding: “Things have been going wrong for a long time and came to a head in December.”

NHS England figures published last week show that more than 19 in 20 beds — 95.7 per cent — were occupied across general and acute hospital wards in the week ending January 15. 

Dr Boyle also warned MPs that the NHS was “haemorrhaging” senior nurses, saying he feared that “burnout was going to lead to burn away.”

“A lot of nurses, especially experienced nurses are leaving in droves,” he said. “Every time I go into work I’m being asked, could you sign this leaving card?”

Some nurses are feeling overwhelmed, while others fear their “registration is at risk because it feels so dangerous,” on emergency wards, he said. 

The health expert accused ministers of not doing enough to retain senior staff, warning that this is also having a knock-on effect on the retention of new nurses. 

The session comes after Dr Boyle warned earlier this month that A&E delays were contributing to between 300 to 500 excess deaths a week. 

Asked to give evidence to support this, the doctor told the committee the figures were based on a study published in the Emergency Medical Journal last year, which looked at an NHS England dataset of seven million patients.  

The study found that for every 72 people who stayed more than eight to 12 hours in A&E, there was one excess death. 

However, later in the session, NHS England chief strategy officer Chris Hopson argued that it was not unusual to see excess deaths in winter, saying Covid and flu could also be factors.

Mr Hopson pointed out that excess deaths in Germany are at a similar level to those in the UK, adding that the study’s 300 to 500 weekly figure “cannot be definitive and does not give a full certain picture.”