“I come to work and can see that there’s a patient waiting eight hours to see a doctor. There are some days where I finish my shift, come back the next day and then I see the same patient still sat waiting in A&E” — the emergency room — “the next day,” Dr. Kiara Vincent, one of the doctors striking, told the BBC on Monday.

But you don’t have to work in a hospital to know that Britain’s N.H.S. is in the most serious crisis of its history; you just have to be injured, or ill. Thousands of people are estimated to have died in the last year because of overwhelmed ambulance and emergency services. There are 7.2 million people in England, more than 10 percent of the population, on waiting lists for treatments like hip or knee replacements, back surgery or cataract operations. And hundreds of thousands of people have had a doctor’s referral for outpatient care at a hospital rejected because there are no available appointments — they are simply bounced back to the doctor to begin the process again…

In the three decades that preceded the pandemic the number of NHS beds in England was more than halved. Shortages — of beds, ventilators or intensive care specialists — in early 2020 were not unique to Britain, but Britain had fewer per capita beds than comparable countries. There was a palpable sense of panic about how Britain and its health service were going to manage.