Royal Cornwall Hospital bed-blocking crisis 'stabilised'

Managers hope operations will go ahead as planned on Wednesday

Hospital managers in Cornwall say that a bed-blocking crisis has "stabilised" and they hope no operations will be postponed on Wednesday.

A delay in discharging patients from the Royal Cornwall Hospital led to a lack of beds and caused 14 operations to be postponed on Monday.

The hospital, Cornwall Council and health commissioners will meet later after a row over the cause.

NHS England in Cornwall said it wanted the situation "resolved quickly".

A spokesman said: "In the coming days we will be meeting with the hospital, the council and the Kernow Clinical Commissioning Group (KCCG) to look at what caused this."

"We have been assured by the hospital that things have stabilised and the intention is that operations scheduled for Wednesday will go ahead as planned.

"The hospital are keeping this under careful review and will contact individual patients directly if necessary."

'Incredibly unfortunate'

On Tuesday hospital managers said partners such as Cornwall Council were not taking enough patients out of the hospital.

In response the council said it had been unaware of the problem and resented being "blamed".

Dr Tamsyn Anderson, the urgent care lead for the KCCG, the GP governing body in Cornwall, said: "I think it's incredibly unfortunate what's happened here.

"We recognise frustrations people face when their ops are cancelled at short notice.

"Ordinarily people in health and social care work very effectively together."

She said that "escalation" procedures should have prevented the build-up of patients in the hospital.

"Something went wrong with that escalation system and that is not good enough for our patients," she said.