Shropshire's A&E waiting times 'well below national standard'
Waiting times at Shropshire's two A&E departments continue to fall below the national standard, health bosses have said.
Hospitals are expected to see 95 per cent of patients within four hours of their A&E attendance.
The national requirement published earlier this year was that all health systems would be achieving 90 per cent by September and 95 per cent by March next year.
In September about 78 per cent of A&E patients were admitted or discharged within four hours at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Telford's Princess Royal.
Julie Davies, director of performance and delivery at Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Group, said: "Given the local workforce challenges in SATH, NHSE agreed a performance improvement trajectory that our system would achieve 85 per cent by March 2018.
"The reported local health system performance against the A&E standard in September was 78 per cent which is far below the standards our patients should expect.
"A&E performance is in a worse position this year as we enter winter than the same period the previous year.
"This means the robustness of the system winter plan is vital if the system is to manage the expected seasonal increases in demand and deliver an improvement in its A&E performance at the same time."
Under the winter plans a number of measures have been agreed to alleviate pressure on the hospitals.
They include a discharge lounge, which would free up beds and in-turn reduce trolley waits in the A&E departments.
Extra nursing staff is also being provided by local clinical commissioning groups to improve ambulance handover times, which have been some of the worst in the region.
Simon Freeman, accountable officer for Shropshire CCG, said they have allocated £2 million from their reserves to help with winter pressures.
They have given £500,000 so far and are in discussions about the remaining £1.5 million.
He said: "We are working very hard with the trust to manage demand.
"Money is not the only problem – the major issue is staffing but we doing everything we can to help."
Simon Wright, chief executive of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, previously said they have identified ways to create 103 beds – four more than the extra capacity required for winter of 99 beds.
Nationally the NHS has consistently missed its own targets for treating A&E patients on time, and in January analysis showed the number of people stuck for more than 12 hours on trolleys has nearly doubled in the last two years.
