GETTING patients back home as quickly as possible is the key to getting Worcestershire’s hospitals back on track, a health boss has said.

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has struggled under the pressure of a constantly high amount of patients since last winter and has routinely missed NHS targets around A&E waiting times and operations waiting lists while also seeing its finances falling deeper into the red.

Although the organisation, which runs Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Kidderminster Hospital and Redditch’s Alexandra Hospital, has put a number of measures in place to improve performance, speaking at a meeting of the trust’s board on Thursday, July 23 interim chief operating officer Rab McEwan said it would be difficult to implement any plans while the amount of patients in hospital remained high.

The most recent figures show at some points in April the Royal was at 105 per cent capacity – meaning beds which might otherwise be used for emergency patients or for elective operations were being taken up by inpatients. This in turn has had a knock-on effect on the trust’s operations backlog and finances.

Mr McEwan said he was “very concerned” about the trust’s performance.

“The underlying issue remains bed occupancy,” he said.

“We haven’t got beds in the right place. We’ve got 30 fewer beds than we need at Worcester but we’ve got excess beds at the Alex.

“Getting the capacity right is something we need to do something about before the winter."

He added discharging people as quickly as possible would not only free up beds, but would also benefit patients themselves as studies have shown recovery is much smoother at home.

“Hospitals are not a safe place to be, particularly if you are an elderly person,” he said.

“An extended stay in hospital is a really, really bad idea.

“We need to get patients out of hospitals and home – not into another bed.”

Mr McEwan added the trust was aiming to meet all its targets around treatment times for cancer patients by the end of August, carrying out at least 90 per cent of elective operations in 18 weeks by the end of September and ensuring at least 95 per cent of patients visting A&E are seen, treated and either admitted or sent home by the end of October.

“We have shown that when we focus on the doing the right thing we do make a difference,” he said.

“We need to redouble our efforts to get to where we have to be.”

The most recent figures show there are currently 25,813 patients in Worcestershire waiting for elective operations, 3,119 of whom have been waiting longer than 18 weeks.