Hospitals across Britain were preparing over the weekend for an expected peak in the flu outbreak which has caused a critical shortage of beds in intensive care.
The note on a bedside locker at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth asks friends and relatives to contact a nurse if they can help to feed, bathe or shave their loved ones. The operations director for medicine says: "I am worried about the stress my nurses and doctors are under."
At a Norwich hospital, refrigerated lorries have become temporary mortuaries because the one on premises is full. In Nottinghamshire, a crematorium is considering the use of floodlights to hold funerals at night to cope with the backlog of burials due to the flu outbreak.
Overcrowded, short-staffed hospitals were supposed to be a thing of the past when New Labour was voted into office in May 1997.
Increased funding for the winter period was promised and arrived when the Health Secretary, Mr Frank Dobson, allocated £250 million sterling to the NHS before Christmas. He has also tried to live up to Labour's pledge to save the service by giving the NHS an additional £21 billion over the next three years.
But this weekend the number of people suffering from flu is expected to surpass the present 188 per 100,000 of the population, according to the Association for Influenza Monitoring and Surveillance.
This does not signal an epidemic, but a combination of the flu crisis, a massive nursing vacancy rate, the British government's commitment to reduce waiting lists and higher patient expectations means the system has been running close to capacity for some years.
Even though 15,500 nurses are in training, the highest figure for six years, the situation has not improved. Defending itself from criticism over staff shortages, the government has laid the blame on the previous Tory administration, which cut trainee nursing levels from about 15,000 each year a decade ago to about 11,000.
Since the introduction of Project 2000 in 1991, it now takes three years to train a nurse. While student nurses spend more time at university the rate at which vacancies are filled is slowing considerably. According to the latest data, there are about 8,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
Turning her anger on Mr Dobson this week, the shadow health secretary, Ms Ann Widdecombe, refused to accept that the Tories might have had any part to play in the nursing shortage. The government, she raged, had not acted quickly enough to prepare a contingency plan for the annual increase in flu patients. "Too slow to recognise the pressure building up" in the NHS and "too slow" to respond to it, she charged.
Added to the immediate problems in the NHS is the annual battle with the government over pay. Traditionally, low-paid nurses are often overlooked in the round of public sector pay increases because their "vocation" is exploited by ministers keen to cut costs elsewhere.
The starting pay for nurses is currently u£12,855 a year compared with £15,011 for newly-qualified teachers - and the government has yet to decide what this year's pay rise will be.
But if - as the nurses pay review body fears - Mr Dobson stages the pay rise rather than paying out in a lump sum, the government can expect even more damaging headlines than it endured this week.
As the NHS prepares for another critical point in its life this weekend - with 3,500 calls a day to the London Ambulance Service, up 30 per cent on last year, and a severe shortage of intensive care beds - it will be the relatives and friends of the patients who will lend a much-needed helping hand.
A relative summed up the feelings of many people this week when he said: "I really noticed how much pressure the nurses were under. I was helping out on the ward . . . pushing beds around and helping to feed and bathe my wife."