7 April 2025, 17:59

By Emma Reid

Spending a day on the front line of the NHS in the West Midlands, I expected to be shocked by ambulances waiting for hours with patients outside the hospital and for beds in corridors, but what I didn’t expect was to find out that staff are giving clothes off their own backs to keep the system moving.

Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield is a busy small hospital serving around half a million patients from Birmingham, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Walsall, Solihull, Wolverhampton, and that mixture plays its part in why there are regularly more than 18 Ambulances queuing outside. The number of people walking into the department is also double that, some of which are more poorly than those on the ambulances.

Emma Cowley is the matron in the Emergency Department, she admits it takes a special kind of person to deal with the relentless pressure. She told me it’s hard coming back into work some days and seeing patients still waiting from her previous shift: "that could be my grandparent sitting in the waiting area … I think of my family in all these situations all the time. I’d be proud of the care they received I wouldn’t be proud of the........

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