More than one in 10 patients are facing a wait of at least 24 hours in A&E, as winter pressures pile up at Blackpool Victoria Hospital.
The latest figures for the weeks between October and Christmas show 13 per cent of patients spent more than 24 hours in A&E – up from around 10 per cent in previous years. On Wednesday, the hospital’s emergency department said it had nearly 140 patients waiting for treatment and urged people to consider using other health services where possible.
A message posted on social media channel X by the Blackpool Emergency Department warned people would “have a long wait” if their condition was not considered urgent. The figures were part of a report presented to a meeting of the Blackpool Teaching Hospitals Board of Directors, which also heard on average two patients a day die while being treated in A&E.
Chief executive Maggie Oldham said the freezing weather was having an impact especially on elderly patients including in relation to cardiac and respiratory illnesses.
She said: “We don’t just see this on the day the weather is poor, we see this pressure that builds up. So for every day we are in these temperatures we will see five subsequent days of increased admissions.”
She added the hospital had been trying to keep alert levels to a minimum but had escalated alerts where necessary, and early in January had declared an internal critical incident alert so staff could concentrate on patients needing the most urgent care.
She said Blackpool was among 42 hospital trusts across the country to declare critical incidents with winter pressures expected to last “well into January”.
Ms Oldham said: “I know for the patients who are actually accessing services, that have been on trolleys and sat in waiting areas across the front emergency portals, they are going to feel like this is a really shoddy service.
“And for that I am really sorry. The work we are trying to do as a system has prevented it from being a little bit worse this year. Winter is very much at the forefront of our minds and it is tough at the moment.”
Janet Barnsley, executive director of integrated care, told the meeting attendances this winter (starting October) at A&E and the Urgent Treatment Centre at Blackpool Victoria Hospital were at their highest compared to previous winters, and eight per cent higher than last year.
However figures show some patients who are less seriously ill are visiting A&E instead of using other out-of-hours health centres in Fleetwood and Whitegate Drive in Blackpool. Christmas week saw a spike in ambulance arrivals which were nearly five per cent higher than last year but handovers were quicker as more beds were free due to patients having been discharged.
But for winter as a whole so far the number of ambulances taking more than an hour to hand over patients has risen by 25 per cent compared to last year. Ms Barnsley said: “This is the first year I have known where we are looking at a winter plan where no additional funding has been made available to us.
“Normally there is a pot of money and we introduce over that 26 week period some additional initiatives that will help us get through winter.”
She said this meant the hospital had to rely on existing resources with no extra cash to help speed up admissions and discharges, which in past years had helped take pressure off the emergency department. It also meant health chiefs could not commission beds in care homes for patients who could not return to their own homes.
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