The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.

This is a global player original podcast.

The stories that have been coming out of our hospitals over the last few days and weeks

right across the UK have been really terrifying. We've been asking you for your

experiences as patients. Where's the dignity for someone in their 80s, potentially spending one of

their last nights alive in the back of an ambulance sat outside a hospital. It just

can't be right. I've seen two people on each occasion that have evidently been suffering

symptoms of stroke, one man of which was just given a pillow to put under his arm.

I feel so sorry for the staff. They're fighting, a losing or even a lost battle.

It's horrendous.

It's like a war zone.

And let's hear what it feels like on the other side of this from a doctor who's in the

midst of this chaos and we'll be hearing a lot more from him later on.

I've had colleagues who have described having to put sheets up and around a patient in a corridor

to allow them to examine them for an intimate examination.

Colleagues have described clearing out cupboards to examine testicles because they couldn't do it in a corridor.

This is obscene.

And the fact that nobody is outraged by this is unconscionable. We've often talked about the NHS being

at breaking point. We figure it may even be broken now. Because the question that we've got to

ask ourselves is if in many cases people are now waiting hours for an ambulance when they have a severe problem,

whether it's a heart attack or a stroke, if people are waiting hours and hours, even when they're in an ambulance, to get into a hospital.

If people are waiting years, yes, literally years, for operations like a hip replacement,

...