Shropshire hospitals already gridlocked heading into winter with 150 patients blocking beds

Sara Biffen, acting chief operating officer at the Shrewsbury & Telford NHS Trust (SaTH), says that both Telford and Shrewsbury hospitals have ‘overcrowded’ emergency departments.

She added that there are around 150 patients in the hospitals that don’t need acute care but require social care, and of those 100 are ready to be discharged immediately.

Mrs Biffen was speaking to Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin councillors at a joint health overview and scrutiny committee this week.

“We’ve got an overcrowded emergency departments and patients who don’t need to be in hospital,” said Mrs Biffen.

“We’re gridlocked basically. The flow out of our emergency departments is not what we would want it to be.

“We are working with our teams to make some improvements, the use of other facilities like our same day emergency care and our acute floor that we can refer patients up to. It’s not enough.

“We need to stop patients coming into our hospitals who don’t need to come and can access services elsewhere. Also how do we improve our flow from our bed base so we get our patients out much quicker?”

David Sandbach, former chief executive of Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital, said that was the same pressure for every other Trust in the country.

Mrs Biffen agreed that other Trusts faced the same challenges but said that SaTH was a ‘little bit behind’ in terms of improvement work they needed to do.

“We can’t get away from the fact that we are admitting patients that we don’t need to admit because there’s not an alternative elsewhere and we’re not discharging patients as quickly as we should do,” added Mrs Biffen.

“We’ve got 150 patients who are medically fit for discharge, of which around 100 of those are ready to go today if there was capacity in social care, whether that’s domiciliary care, nursing homes or re-ablement beds.”

Hayley Flavell, director of nursing at Shrewsbury & Telford Hospital NHS Trust, added that if those 100 patients were in their ‘appropriate place of residence’ that would improve the emergency department’s performance.

Councillors posed a set of burning questions in the meeting to health bosses – including Simon Whitehouse, chief executive of NHS Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin.

Telford & Wrekin councillor Derek White asked the chiefs why it had taken so long for SaTH to talk to the joint health overview and scrutiny committee.

Mr Whitehouse replied that different representatives had met with them to talk about different themes.

“There’s absolutely a commitment for us going forward in terms of the relationship we have with individual (overview and scrutiny committees) and the joint committee,” said Mr Whitehouse.

“I can’t comment on looking back beyond the last 12 months because I wasn’t in the system before then.

“Our commitment going forward is that we’re around the table both formally and informally to support and develop the work, and continue to bring the transparency of the work and improvement work that we’re driving across the system.

The joint committee’s co-chairman Geoff Elner said that meetings with health bosses had shown that there was a ‘willingness to work together’.