Responding to warnings issued today by acute and ambulance trusts, Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said:

"NHS trusts right across England are still under enormous strain as the number of people with COVID-19 in hospital continues to rise.

"Although thanks to mass vaccination we're not seeing the high levels of serious illness and deaths we've seen before, COVID-19 hasn't gone away.

"We're very concerned about the real pressures across the whole health and care system. A very high number of hospital beds are occupied and combined with staff absences and severe workforce shortages this means that trusts can't recover care backlogs as quickly as they want to.

"Ambulance services are doing everything they can in these extremely difficult circumstances but the extra pressures are leading to growing delays to handovers to busy emergency departments. This means that ambulances aren't able to get back out into the community as quickly as they would like.

"Trust leaders and everybody in the NHS are keenly aware of the impact of delays and addressing them is an absolute priority."