Sickness bug led to hospital critical incident
UHNMAn outbreak of gastroenteritis on hospital wards in Staffordshire contributed to a trust declaring a critical incident, bosses have confirmed.
Dr Steve Fawcett, clinical director of urgent care in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent, said parts of the hospital system were suffering “severe pressure” leading to very long wait times and ambulance delays.
He said the hospitals dealt with infections every year over winter and that declaring a critical incident would help open up capacity.
He urged people with less serious conditions to seek help from pharmacies first.
The trust, which runs the Royal Stoke University Hospital and County Hospital in Stafford, declared a critical incident on Tuesday.
“While the NHS is absolutely there to treat the ill and people who need hospital treatment, what we really need is to try and give the hospitals some space to deal with those sick patients,” Dr Fawcett said.
There were three wards affected at present, although not all beds were out of use as a result, he said.
“We’ve got infection in the hospital with things like gastroenteritis, which is closing down some of our bed capacity... and causing problems with flow of patients through the system - back into their own homes.”
He added: “It won’t be all the beds, necessarily, on those wards that are affected, but there are a significant number of beds that have been taken out of action because we have to wait for a specific time period for the infection control team to give it the all-clear, for them to be re-used.”
Dr Fawcett said the hospital faces operational pressures due to infection control every year during the winter months, but had seen a surge recently which had taken a number of wards out of use.
“The whole system is busy, everyone’s working really hard, and it just aggravates it when you’ve got other issues that contribute to the pressure,” he said.
He added that critical incidents usually only lasted for a number of days and that the situation was being reviewed on an hourly basis.
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