Patients in Brighton and Hove face appalling waits in accident and emergency as services are swamped by a summer crisis.

At Brighton's Royal Sussex County Hospital, the number of patients coming to A&E is 27 per cent up on last year. Rebecca Burgess talks to one horrified family.

When 74-year-old Violet Morrison collapsed at home, she was taken to hospital by ambulance, hurt and afraid.

Placed in a bed in the Royal Sussex County Hospital's new casualty unit, where the sick and elderly now wait instead of on trollies, the elderly woman hoped to be seen by a doctor shortly.

Twenty minutes later and she was joined by her worried son, Bill Morrison, who found his mother in a side room with a nurse taking a blood sample.

The nurse left, saying a doctor would be with them shortly, and Mr Morrison patiently waited and calmed his distressed mother.

It took six hours and repeated requests for information before a doctor finally set foot in Mrs Morrison's room.

This distressing brush with the state of the National Health Service has left Mr Morrison horrified.

He said: "Anyone who believes the NHS is not in need of drastic action is obviously totally oblivious to what is happening in the real world. I really do wonder if the NHS looks at the treatment of elderly people as a very low priority and a waste of resources.

"I would never have believed this in the past but what recently happened to my mother tells me different."

Mr Morrison, of Hove, added: "I completely understand these people are busy and that patients do have to wait but not once in the two-and-a-half hours I was waiting did anyone check on my mother's condition or tell me what was going on."

The wait continued with the pair being promised more than once a doctor would arrive in 15 minutes. After six hours, when the doctor arrived, he said Mrs Morrison needed to see an occupational therapist and another 30-minute wait ensued.

It was then decided the pensioner needed to be kept in overnight and at 9.30pm she was transferred to Brighton General Hospital.

She had arrived at A&E almost 12 hours earlier.

Reports of the sick and elderly waiting several hours in accident and emergency departments are not new, particularly during the winter when the situation is compounded by bad weather and outbreaks of 'flu.

But the A&E at the Royal Sussex is finding itself as stretched this summer as during the winter, with no obvious explanation.

Patients round the country have waited much longer than Mrs Morrison and most have not been so fortunate as to enjoy a bed in a side-room.

But it is the horrifying acceptance that this is the "norm" which has so shocked and disheartened Mr Morrison.

The Royal Sussex is apologetic of the wait endured by Mrs Morrison and says it is not what they would hope for their patients.

Ian Keeber, spokes-man for the Brighton Health Care NHS Trust, said: "We have a system where patients are seen fairly quickly by a nurse who makes a decision on the level of emergency for that person to be seen.

"For the patient concerned, they want to be seen as quickly as possible but when we have other emergencies you can't see everybody at once so people do have to wait.

"For someone who has fallen down it's traumatic but obviously there were other people who had emergency cases, from major accidents to heart attacks, who needed to be treated quicker."

He said the number of patients coming to A&E had risen by 27 per cent compared to this time last year.

"It is putting a huge amount of pressure on organisations but we can't turn off the emergency tap."

However, he added that currently staff at the Royal Sussex were "coping admirably".

He stressed there was no indication patients needing immediate emergency treatment were not being treated.