Health critical incident expanded across Nottinghamshire

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City Hospital NottinghamImage source, PA Media
Image caption,

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the Queen's Medical Centre and Nottingham City Hospital, declared a critical incident earlier this week

A critical incident alert has been expanded across the whole of Nottinghamshire's healthcare system.

NHS Nottingham and Nottinghamshire said "extreme pressures" across the county's hospitals had led to the move so "coordinated additional steps" could be made to prioritise care.

Hospitals have seen high demand alongside difficulties in discharging patients into other support services.

This has led to people facing longer waits to access hospital beds.

Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) NHS Trust declared a critical incident and confirmed some operations would be postponed earlier in the week.

But NHS Nottingham and Nottinghamshire has now announced the scope of the alert has been widened as pressures are being felt across the system.

'Flow problem'

Chief executive Amanda Sullivan said staff were working to ease pressures and apologised that it had been "necessary to take this step".

She said: "This allows us to put measures in place to ensure that people can continue to safely access emergency services when they need them.

"I am sorry that it has been necessary to take this step, but it is important that we focus on patients needing urgent and emergency care as a priority.

"Please continue to attend for your appointments or procedures unless you are contacted."

Analysis

By Rob Sissons, BBC East Midlands Today health correspondent

Critical incidents may sound like a piece of NHS jargon and in many ways it is, but the grim reality is it's a sure sign of huge pressure on the NHS that prior to the pandemic was usually associated with the depths of winter.

It will be very concerning to NHS staff and those in social care that we're seeing the highest state of alert triggered in September.

There was an earlier system-wide alert across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire in July. This chimes with what NHS staff have been telling us for months that the strain on the health service is now year-round with a record backlog of people waiting for NHS treatments.

What's happening now will concentrate NHS managers' minds as to whether their contingency planning for winter will be sufficient to avoid this happening again.

Speaking at a board meeting on Thursday, Nick Carver - chair of the NUH trust board - said it had 213 patients medically fit for discharge still in hospital. The system's target is 64.

He said: "The pressure on staff in the emergency department is not due to an increase in demand, it is due to a flow problem.

"There are 150 more patients beyond the system plan in this organisation at this moment in time.

"Our staff are doing their utmost to make sure we don't have that awful situation where an ambulance cannot be mobilised to someone in need. That for me is the worst of all situations."

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