ALTHOUGH pressure on Worcestershire’s two A&E departments appears to be easing, hospitals in the county are still struggling under extreme demand.

Both emergency departments at Worcestershire Royal Hospital and Redditch’s Alexandra Hospital have been under what has been called “unprecedented” pressure in recent weeks, resulting in patients often facing long waits for treatment.

Although only 80.9 per cent of patients visiting the two departments over the past week have been either sent home or admitted to hospital within four hours – far below the NHS target of 95 per cent – this is a general improvement from earlier in the month.

The most recent data also shows there are currently 600 beds ‘blocked’ at the Royal, the Alex and Kidderminster Hospital – far above the national average of 148 – but this has also decreased since the start of the month, suggesting measures put in place to deal with the problem is having some effect.

Speaking at a meeting of NHS South Worcestershire Clinical Commissioning Group on Thursday, January 22, the organisation’s chief operating officer Simon Trickett said the county’s entire healthcare economy had been under serious strain.

“All across the country it’s been a very difficult couple of months,” he said. “But I think we can claim a minor moral victory in Worcestershire that we are one of the counties who haven’t had to declare a major incident.

“The system has coped and we were able to carry on.”

Board member Dr Alistair Munro asked if delays in discharging people from hospital had been compounded by people working in the social care sector taking time off over Christmas and the New Year.

“We all know staff like to have time off at Christmas – as we all do – but is this really the best time to be taking holiday?,” he said.

Mr Trickett said it was not clear if staff taking time off had impacted the problem.

“We plan for full service across 365 days a year and there’s a culture in the NHS to delivering this,” he said

“That has always been a challenge in social care but we spent time making sure the service was there.”

Figures have also shown 270 patients visiting the Royal or the Alex waited longer than eight hours for a bed once a decision had been made to admit them to hospital in the first 11 days in January, with nine of these waiting longer than 12 hours.

The amount of elective operations which have had to be postponed due to a lack of beds is also down, with 24 procedures at the three sites cancelled in the past week compared with 14 the previous week.

Overall across England 8,900 patients waited longer than four hours to be admitted to hospital on the week ending Sunday, January 18, down from 12,000 the previous week, while 377,000 people went to an A&E department, a decrease from 389,400 the previous week.