THE continued failure by the organisation running Worcestershire’s three main hospitals to meet waiting times and other targets is “not acceptable”, one of the county’s senior health bosses has said.

Speaking at a meeting of South Worcestershire Clinical Commissioning Group’s governing body last week, chief clinical officer Dr Carl Ellson said the extent to which Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust had continued to miss national targets around measures such as waiting times at A&E and the amount of time patients had to wait for elective operations was becoming a source of serious concern.

The trust, which runs Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Kidderminster Hospital and Redditch’s Alexandra Hospital, has consistently failed to meet the NHS target of seeing, treating and either discharging or admitting at least 95 per cent of patients visiting A&E within four hours for the past nine months, and more than a year at the Royal alone.

Latest figures show in April 25.74 per cent of patients visiting the Royal’s A&E waited longer than four hours, with the figure across the trust as a whole standing slightly better at 13.08 per cent.

Speaking at the meeting on Thursday, May 21 Dr Ellson said, although there had been some improvement in the trust’s figures, much work remained to be done.

“This is not acceptable,” he said.

“But they can’t sort this out by themselves in isolation.

“About 40 per cent of this is across the whole health economy.”

The trust has also failed to meet the target of carrying out at least 95 per cent of elective operations within 18 weeks of the initial referral, only meeting the in 80.48 per cent of cases in April.

Although Dr Ellson said he hoped the 95 per cent A&E target could be met by the end of June, fellow board member Rob Parker said he believed it would take longer to clear the backlog of operations.

“It strikes me that their ability to deliver that is going to be some months away,” he said. “An estimate I hear is September and that’s probably the earliest.”

He added he was “baffled” by the trust’s continued failure to meet the targets as figures showed the overall amount of patients visiting hospitals was down about 10 per cent.

“Either the way there handling people when they turn up is wrong or they are keeping people in hospital too long,” he said.

The trust – which recently set up a modular theatre at the Alex in an effort to clear the backlog of elective operations – has previously said the problem is at least partially down to a lack of capacity in the county’s social and community care sector.

CCG board member Sarah Speck said the organisation needed to take the reins to solve the problems.

“We’ve spent the last few months watching the system unravel,” she said.

“We need to put it back together.”

The problems at the trust are due to be discussed at a meeting of its board at Kidderminster Hospital tomorrow, Thursday, May 28. For reports see the Worcester News website.