QUIET periods are a thing of the past at GWH now as staff are forced to adapt to relentless pressure.

Top doctor Guy Rooney said the age of winter pressures and summer pressures are now long gone.

“It has got more continuous, there is no relief,” he said.

“You used to get quieter months but now it’s just continuous. Staff are coping because that is just what people do but it is relentless.”

But despite the pressure they are under every day, Dr Rooney said he was amazed at the resilience of the doctors, nurses and other staff.

“I’m amazed at how buoyant staff morale has remained. To come in every day without any relief is very tiring,” he said.

“When it gets so overwhelming that you can’t do the good work you want to be doing, I think that’s when people really find it hard.

“We’ve been putting extra resources and extra staffing in to try and help cope with that.

“Despite people on trolleys queueing round the front desk they get a tremendous amount of positive feedback.

“I was chatting with patients on Thursday and they said the staff had been fantastic, that they had really been looking after them.”

It isn’t just the emergency department that is feeling the strain - planned procedures hang in the balance each day depending on the availability of hospital beds.

Each day teams of staff, many who left work hours before, work well into the night to come up with ways to free up beds for patients arriving the following morning.

“I was the on-call executive on Thursday night,” said Dr Rooney. “We knew we had 10 people coming in for procedures on Friday morning.

“We were making those decisions at 11pm – we were still working, ducking and diving and skating, to get all of that in place.

“We go to the wire to make it happen.

“Then it starts again the next day, and again the day after. It is relentless.

“The level of additional work just to keep everything going puts a real strain on staff.”