Critical incident at Shrewsbury and Telford hospitals over as normal service resumes
A critical incident at the county's major hospitals has been stood down.
Shrewsbury & Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) confirmed that the incident was over in a statement on Tuesday morning.
The incident was the fourth the trust has declared this year.
A statement from the trust, which manages both Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Princess Royal Hospital in Telford, said: "Following a review with our clinical teams and system partners, the critical incident has now been stood down.
"Due to the hard work and close cooperation of all involved, all services have been resumed as normal."
SaTH had said the latest incident was a result of "intense pressure due to the exceptionally high levels of demand".
The trust said that Covid pressures were continuing to have an impact – as well as not being able to discharge healthy patients.
A spokesman said: "Despite us taking every available option to free up capacity and create additional space, we need to ensure we can continue to prioritise our services and so we have declared a new critical incident. This means that we are pausing a very limited number of non-urgent services to allow us to meet the most urgent needs of those we care for.
"Urgent services, including cancer, and time-critical procedures will continue, and we will contact patients directly who may be affected by delays to non-urgent treatment or postponed appointments.
“If you have an appointment in our hospitals but have not been contacted, please continue to attend your appointment as before."
The lack of available capacity in hospitals has in turn led to major pressure on the region's ambulance service, with many paramedics left off the road as they wait to hand over patients at hospitals. There have been unprecedented delays for people waiting for help after calling 999 as a result.
