One of England's biggest hospitals postpones all non-emergency surgery for at least a month amid fears patients will have to wait in pain throughout winter amid Covid pressure

England's biggest NHS trust has had to cancel all planned surgeries at one of its hospitals due to a 'significant' rise in 'very sick' patients.

University Hospitals Birmingham said the Queen Elizabeth was struggling to cope with a sharp rise in coronavirus and non-coronavirus emergency cases.

All non-emergency operations booked until the end of the month will have to be delayed indefinitely. But the trust said this would be reviewed on an ongoing basis.

It means people who have been waiting for weeks and months, some in pain, for life-improving operations including joint replacements and hernias will miss out. 

UHB said the Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield had also been forced to postpone gynaecology procedures to free up beds. The trust has yet to clarify how many operations will be affected by the move. 

It is true that UHB's hospitals are treating a growing number of Covid-19 patients - there were 359 on November 3, the most recent snapshot, compared to 232 the week before. 

But Karol Sikora, a consultant oncologist and professor of medicine at the University of Buckingham, said it's not uncommon for planned surgeries to be cancelled during to cope with winter pressures.  

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham has had to cancel all planned surgeries due to a 'significant' rise in 'very sick' patients

UHB said the Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield had also been forced to postpone gynaecology procedures to free up beds

He told MailOnline: 'It's not uncommon to free up beds. Elderly people with comorbidities always come at winter, ever since I've been a medical student.

'Because there has been declining social care in recent years they have nowhere else to go so they end up in hospitals. 

'We sometimes have had to close surgeries down to make room for them to cope with winter pressures.' 

Hospitals are NO busier than normal, experts claim 

The NHS was never on track to be overwhelmed with coronavirus patients this winter but No10 was forced to hit the lockdown panic button because of its 'gloomster' scientific advisers, top experts have fumed.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has warned the health service could collapse and seriously ill non-Covid patients could be turned away unless Covid-19's resurgence is nipped in the bud. 

But eminent doctors and scientists told MailOnline ministers had got their priorities twisted by sacrificing people's physical and mental wellbeing to save the NHS — which was designed to protect the people.

They claimed wards are no busier than they normally are at this time of year and that a large chunk of the people being treated for Covid-19 were either already in hospital when they caught the virus or would've been admitted for other reasons.

Oxford University's Professor Carl Heneghan, an expert in evidence-based medicine and practicing GP, said his analysis suggested a fifth of infected patients in the NHS acquired the virus in hospital, meaning they were already taking up a bed before contracting the disease. 

NHS England has about 140,000 beds at its disposal - including capacity at the seven Nightingale hospital built during the first wave and thousands of beds commandeered from the private sector - and currently there are just shy of 10,500 Covid-19 patients in its hospitals. It means people with the disease are occupying fewer than 10 per cent of the health service's overall capacity.  

Leaked documents suggest the NHS on a national scale is actually treating fewer patients than it was last year. Just 84 per cent of all hospital beds were occupied across the country on Tuesday, according to the document, which is lower than the 92 per cent recorded over the autumn of 2019.

It is true that a small handful of hospitals in hotspots in the North West are under strain after bearing the brunt of a surge in infections in recent months. But Karol Sikora, a consultant oncologist and professor of medicine at the University of Buckingham, said: 'This is supposed to be a national health service, if Leeds' ICU is full, we can send patients to Newcastle, for example. We do it all the time, for other conditions.' 

Both Professor Sikora and Professor Heneghan claimed the health service is put under pressure every winter from other seasonal illnesses - due to having the lowest bed capacity per population in Europe - yet it manages to come out the other side without the need for the UK to adopt crude interventions.

In a statement, UHB said: 'All planned procedures at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham have been postponed due the significant increase in the number of very sick patients (Covid and non-Covid) admitted to our hospitals as an emergency.

'Gynaecology procedures at Good Hope Hospital have also been paused. This is an extremely difficult decision and has not been taken lightly.'

The statement continued: 'We know that affected patients will be distressed and upset with this decision, and for this we can only apologise.

'However, we must ensure that all those needing urgent care are able to access treatment safely.

'Cancer treatment and life-saving care will remain our priority. All patients affected by this announcement will be contacted individually to rearrange their postponed surgery.'

NHS England figures show there were 359 coronavirus patients in UHB's hospitals on November 3, which had risen 55 per cent in a week. For comparison, there were 132 a month before, on October 3.

But they are still only at about half of the levels seen during the darkest days of the first wave. On April 12 - the worst day for English hospitals - there were 694 Covid-19 taking up beds at UHB. 

It's not currently clear how many non-virus emergency admissions the trust is currently recording because the NHS does not routinely publish that information.

But looking at September, there were 13,426 emergency admissions in total compared to 13,328 in the month of August.

Professor Sikora told MailOnline these are normal levels for the time or year and said hospitals always come under similar pressure during winter. 

And data seems to back up his claim - last September, there were actually more emergency admissions (15,237).

It comes as top experts told MailOnline the NHS is still not on track to be overwhelmed with coronavirus patients this winter. 

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has warned the health service could collapse and seriously ill non-Covid patients could be turned away unless Covid-19's resurgence is nipped in the bud. 

But eminent doctors and scientists told MailOnline ministers had got their priorities twisted by sacrificing people's physical and mental wellbeing to save the NHS — which was designed to protect the people.

They claimed wards are no busier than they normally are at this time of year and that a large chunk of the people being treated for Covid-19 were either already in hospital when they caught the virus or would've been admitted for other reasons.

Oxford University's Professor Carl Heneghan, an expert in evidence-based medicine and practicing GP, said his analysis suggested a fifth of infected patients in the NHS acquired the virus in hospital, meaning they were already taking up a bed before contracting the disease. 

NHS England has about 140,000 beds at its disposal - including capacity at the seven Nightingale hospital built during the first wave and thousands of beds commandeered from the private sector - and currently there are just shy of 10,500 Covid-19 patients in its hospitals. It means people with the disease are occupying fewer than 10 per cent of the health service's overall capacity.  

Leaked documents suggest the NHS on a national scale is actually treating fewer patients than it was last year. Just 84 per cent of all hospital beds were occupied across the country on Tuesday, according to the document, which is lower than the 92 per cent recorded over the autumn of 2019.

It is true that a small handful of hospitals in hotspots in the North West are under strain after bearing the brunt of a surge in infections in recent months. But Professor Sikora added: 'This is supposed to be a national health service, if Leeds' ICU is full, we can send patients to Newcastle, for example. We do it all the time, for other conditions.' 

Both Professor Sikora and Professor Heneghan claimed the health service is put under pressure every winter from other seasonal illnesses - due to having the lowest bed capacity per population in Europe - yet it manages to come out the other side without the need for the UK to adopt crude interventions.

Another senior NHS intensive care doctor made similar comments to MailOnline but claimed they were silenced by health bosses, who threatened them with disciplinary action if they contradicted the hospital data used to justify the lockdown.  

One told this website: 'It is my personal view a lockdown was not needed right now, the data they've used has been conveniently sampled. The official rationale from the Government will be to ensure people are safe and lives are saved but I think the real reason is they do not want to receive the same criticism they did the first time round. 

The first lockdown, while successful in protecting the NHS from being overwhelmed with Covid-19, has had a catastrophic effect on healthcare across the board. There were 27million fewer GP appointments than normal during the shut down, raising fears it led to the worsening of other conditions such as asthma and diabetes. 

Tens of thousands less people than average went for cancer checks during that time and there were hundreds more deaths from heart attacks.  Nearly a million people have lost their jobs since March and, when the furlough scheme ends next year, this is expected to rise again.