SPENDING eight hours in Darlington Memorial Hospital’s A&E department on Wednesday night provided me with an invaluable insight into what is driving the current surge in demand.

It also suggested what needs to be done to ease the annual winter crisis in our hospitals, although politicians may find it difficult to raise the indelicate subject of raising taxes.

First of all, after talking to a number of senior A&E doctors at NHS trusts across the region there seems to me one inescapable reason for the increased pressure on A&E departments - the fact that so many people are living longer.

The word ‘demographics’ came up again and again. Emergency department doctors point to the ‘greying’ of the North-East population, with an increasing number of residents aged over 80.

The North-East has one of the highest proportions of elderly residents in England and as the years pass, more and more of them are becoming increasingly ill and increasingly frail.

This is clearly the main reason why our hospitals are coming under such stress.

A&E doctors seem to agree that there is a real but relatively small problem with younger, fitter people turning up “inappropriately” at the door of emergency departments with no more than a headache, a hangover or - in one recent case – an ingrowing toenail. This is largely due to patients not being able to get a GP appointment soon enough and an unwillingness to wait.

But the big picture is that year on year our A&E departments are having to cope with more and more elderly patients arriving in ambulances - often with multiple illnesses - with the same number of A&E treatment rooms, beds and staff.

There is no getting away from the ageing of the population and its inevitable implication for the NHS.

Several A&E doctors lamented the decline of the nuclear family, which means that is is often not safe to send elderly patients home, but councils have borne the brunt of spending cuts and it is becoming more difficult to find care home places for patients who can no longer live independently.

Increasing efforts are being made to treat elderly patients in their homes and prevent hospital admissions but the scale of the task is not matched by the resources available to community nursing.

The bottom line seems to be that if we want to avoid more horror stories about elderly patients facing long waits for ambulances and hospital beds we, as a society, have to increase our investment in the NHS.

Certainly, after spending an inspiring night observing the dedicated staff at Darlington Memorial Hospital, I can only say they deserve every penny.