Hospital closure Anger growing at management of Weston General

FRUSTRATION is mounting over Weston General Hospital bosses’ handling of its closure to admissions.

The hospital in Weston-superMare “temporarily stopped accepting new patients” on Monday, even at its A&E department, due to a “high number of patients with coronavirus”.

The University Hospitals Bristol and Weston (UHBW) trust has said it will be shut for “at least a week, possibly longer”, the BBC reported yesterday.

Some 40 per cent of staff tested last week had tested positive and 64 patients were found to be infected last weekend.

The trust is under fire over a lack of media interviews and failing to answering various questions since Monday, including how many Covid-19 deaths have happened at Weston General.

Weston’s mayor Mark Canniford told the Bristol Post: “It has been frustrating. The management at the trust have not dealt with this particularly well.

“Media have struggled to get interviews. I’m assuming that’s because either the management don’t have answers or they don’t want to be lambasted.

“They need to up their game a bit. We need information.”

Trade union Unison has said “urgent improvements” to communication are needed. Unison representative Joanne Kaye said staff have been “left in the dark”.

She added: “The biggest concern is that staff aren’t routinely being informed when their colleagues test positive for the virus.

“This means they’re unable to make informed decisions about whether they need to be tested. The trust must make sure managers tell staff at the earliest possible opportunity.

“Many of those who work at the hospital only heard about the temporary closure through social media, which is a major communications failure.

“They must be told directly, not pick things up second-hand through friends and family.”

Ms Kaye says she is concerned about reports black members of staff are not being prioritised for testing.

“Given the higher rate of mortality for this group, the Trust must rectify this urgently,” she added.

UHBW chief executive Robert Woolley told the BBC the 40 per cent figure for staff who tested positive last week was a sample of the most high-risk workers in “the Covid-infectious wards”.

He added: “We are re-testing all inpatients and testing all staff on site. By the end of the week I should have the results that tell me what we’re dealing with, in terms of the scale of infection inside the hospital. Then we’ll be able to put our plan together to reopen but I need to be clear that it’s probably at least a week possibly longer before we’re able to do that.”

Mr Woolley expects the number of patients in the hospital to reduce “drastically” over the next week as more are discharged, which will allow deep-cleaning.

Matt Joint, the trust’s director of people, said: “Our top priority continues to be the safety and wellbeing of our patients and staff.

“We are in the process of testing all staff at Weston General Hospital as quickly as possible. Staff testing and reporting is carried out in line with national guidance.

“We endeavoured to inform our staff as soon as possible about the temporary changes at the hospital so they heard it directly from the Trust, either face-to-face or through a wide range of our communications channels.

“We are in correspondence with union representatives, including Unison, and welcome them raising these concerns with us.”