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Dr Peter Carter, of the Royal College of Nursing: "This is a system under huge strain"
Health service chiefs have demanded urgent action to tackle the growing pressures on A&E departments.
NHS England has given regional health bosses until the end of the month to come up with plans to tackle problems.
Emergency funds will be made available to help amid warnings from the regulator that hospitals will no longer be able to cope if demands keep rising.
The Care Quality Commission said another Stafford Hospital scandal was being risked because of the problems.
In recent months the NHS has been struggling to hit its four-hour waiting time target.
Reports have emerged of hospitals setting up temporary waiting areas in car parks and storerooms to cope with queues.
Ambulances have also been forced to wait to drop off patients.
It has been clear for some time that pressures have been growing in A&E.
For the past decade the numbers attending the units has been rising year by year. There are now more than 21 million visits annually - up 50% in a decade.
There is a combination of reasons why they have grown, including a rise in number of people with chronic conditions, such as heart disease that end up having emergencies; the ageing population; and problems accessing out-of-hours GP care. A&E units have also had problems recruiting middle-grade doctors, which creates staffing problems.
But until recently hospitals had just about been coping. The harsh winter seems to have tipped A&E units over the edge.
In the past few months, the waits that patients face have reached their worst levels for a long time.
The four-hour target - 95% of patients have to be seen to in this time - started to be breached in many places. Since the start of last month, the NHS overall has missed it.
There are signs that, with the weather improving so have the waiting times, but not as much as many would have liked.
The problem is that A&E is the safety net of the NHS: the place people go when there is no other option. If it breaks there is a real problem.
NHS England said it now wants regional health bosses to work together to ensure plans are in place for each A&E in their patch, with extra money being made available where problems are identified.
Prof Keith Willett, of NHS England, said: "When pressure builds across the health and social care system, the symptoms are usually found in the A&E department.
"We need the whole NHS system, in the community and hospitals, to recognise the problems and help to relieve the pressure on their colleagues in A&E."
A review, led by medical director Sir Bruce Keogh, is already under way to address the issues in the long term.
'Market failure'The announcement by NHS England came on the day the Care Quality Commission painted a dire picture of the pressure hospitals were under.
CQC chairman David Prior said: "Emergency admissions through accident and emergency are out of control in large parts of the country. That is totally unsustainable."
He added that there was no cast-iron guarantee that there would not be a repeat of the situation at Stafford Hospital.
Mr Prior is also reported to have suggested the large-scale closure of hospital beds and investment in community services.
He added: "The patient or resident is the weakest voice in the system. It is a classic market failure. The user doesn't know nearly as much as the professionals, even with the internet."
Mr Prior is not alone in proposing a radical shake-up of A&E services.
The College of Emergency Medicine, which represents casualty department doctors, believes that between 15% and 30% of patients admitted could be treated elsewhere.
Care Minister Norman Lamb said that people had lost confidence in the services provided when their GP surgery was not open.
"We have out-of-hours care that too often falls down," he said.
"People end up with the default option of A&E because there is nothing else that they are confident in."
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