“Can that guy sit, do we think?” asks Dr Raj Pow, senior consultant in the emergency department at Warwick Hospital.

He is talking about a 90-year-old patient who was brought to home after fainting, where he was found cold and confused.

Now he is stable. Can this open the bed?

“If we can get him to sit, he can go to one of the chairs and that will free up his bed,” says Dr. Pau.

These are the conversations doctors and nurses are having in hospitals across the country as a severe flu season puts the NHS under pressure.

More than a dozen hospitals have declared serious incidents — some of which are considered among the best in the country.

Earlier this week, the BBC visited Warwick Hospital. It is run by the South Warwickshire Trust, which is one of the top rated in the country and prides itself on the smooth running of its four hospitals.

But this week the case load has been very high.

Warwick Hospital has 375 beds and at one time anticipated demand was about 100 more than that. For the first time, it had to be declared a serious incident – ​​the highest alert level in the NHS.

The BBC was present when hospital administrators made the call. Declaring a serious incident is a warning to the local health system that the situation is worsening. Often, this frees up hospitals to redeploy doctors and create new temporary ward space.

Over a period of two days, the BBC saw doctors and nurses doing just that: finding stop-gap solutions to treat patients in whatever safe settings could be set up.

With emergency departments overcrowded, sick people have to be treated in the very chairs they are sitting in.

Others had to wait in ambulances parked outside emergency units for hours before being taken inside.

One such patient is Percy, who is 80 years old and is suffering from liver failure. He came to the hospital because he was feeling ill and had lost weight in recent weeks.

Dr Arun Jayakumar, senior registrar of the ward, is one of the doctors sent to examine patients like Percy.

Going into the ambulance, he had a brief consultation with her. He tells Percy that everything is being done to get him to the hospital.

Percy smiled softly, resigned to wait.

The paramedic who brought him to the hospital has also resigned: he has seen too many cases like Percy’s this season.

He turns on the heating in the back of the ambulance and sits down again while Dr. Jayakumar gets out and closes the doors.

Doctors, nurses and consultants in the emergency department discuss how to make room for the new arrivals.

Hospital beds are at an absolute premium. So many patients have arrived that a room has been set up near the ambulance entrance for those deemed “fit to sit”.

Every chair is occupied.

“It’s not ideal,” says one doctor. “But it’s safe.”

Porters have to move beds through this open space, between patients being treated in chairs and nurses kneeling on the floor to remove tubes. The drip stand is moved back and forth to make space.

We see a nurse wheeling a patient, still on a drip, to the toilet in a wheelchair.

She leaves the chair in the corridor and helps the patient. A porter comes and goes to take away the empty wheelchair.

The nurse quickly walks out. “That’s my wheelchair,” she cries.

We turn it back to her and she starts laughing. “You can’t take your eyes off them, even for a moment, or there will be another patient in there,” she says – only half joking.

Elsewhere, Percy is rushed to the emergency department by ambulance after a three-hour wait.

“It’s getting worse,” he says, closing his eyes nervously – but it will be another 12 hours before Percy is admitted to the ward.

When we finally see him move, he is contorted in pain on his bed and clutching the sick bowl.

Dr. Pow’s first task during his visit is to check the rooms to see who he can remove from the bed.

There is an entire waiting room right outside his door and four ambulances parked outside.

In the last room he enters, a woman is crying. Dr. Pow gets the latest information on his condition from a nurse and orders some morphine.

“You’re in the right place,” he tells the patient. “We will take away your pain.”

Dr. Pau tells us: “The people who come in now are sicker than before. And here we are, trying to get them out quickly.”

He then visits a man who was admitted with a heart attack two days ago but is no longer receiving active treatment. Can he be moved safely, Dr. Paw wonders.

“These are decisions we are being forced to make,” he told the BBC.

“I’m considering moving a heart attack patient to the waiting room so I can take his room.”

Another patient Dr. Pau had observed the previous day was still waiting for a bed in the ward, even after more than 24 hours.

“This is nonsense. This shouldn’t be happening,” says Dr. Pau. “People should not be spending 27, 28 hours in the emergency department.”

At one point during our time in the hospital we were taken to a bank of screens displaying statistics.

It revealed that patients in the emergency department had been waiting for a bed for almost 30 hours and there were six ambulances queued outside. One was there for four hours.

“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” says one doctor.

The South Warwickshire Trust on Thursday dismissed the serious incident – which had been going on for 48 hours. However, staff told the BBC that the pressure on the hospital is still very high.