Shropshire hospitals still missing A&E waiting time targets
Shropshire's two main hospitals are still failing to meet A&E waiting time targets, despite a £1 million investment.
Hospital bosses say the extra money put in place for the winter has meant that the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Telford's Princess Royal Hospital have so far coped better than last year.
However, a meeting of Telford and Wrekin Clinical Commissioning Group was told yesterday that, despite improvements to the estate within the emergency department at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust (SaTH), performance in meeting the national A&E target "has not improved as hoped".
At the end of last month, emergency departments at the RSH and Princess Royal PRH saw a total of 2,445 people – an average of almost 350 people per day. This is an increase of 231 people on the previous week – or 33 people each day – and has put major pressure on the system.
CCG board member Dylan Harrison told the meeting: "PRH continues to perform better than RSH but consistently fails on non-admitted four-hour breaches.
"The reasons put forward for this are increased number of attendees, environment and reduced decision makers in the emergency department.
"A performance notice has been issued to SaTH and therefore a formal process is in place to monitor improvement.
"This continues into 2016."
David Evans, chief officer for Telford and Wrekin CCG, told board members: "In the period since New Year there had been some optimism as performance, whilst not achieving the target, was improving.
"Over the past fortnight, however, performance has dropped back significantly and whilst this is consistent with what is happening regionally and nationally it is not at a level that is consistent with high quality care.
"At a national level there has been a significant increase in demand in the last week in particular and we have seen locally that attendance numbers have been higher in the week beginning January 25 than predicted, which has had an impact on performance and against the delivery of the recovery plan.
"Last week urgent care was struggling with a bad week.
"About 75 per cent of patients were seen within four hours of their A&E attendance. However, this figure has picked up over the weekend and the percentage is back into the mid 80s.
"We met last week and identified some areas to look at.
"We need to make sure the additional area opened at Telford and the walk-in centre in Shrewsbury are used to their full capacity."
