Years sent 190 miles for surgery
challenge for us and it is asking patients to have care outside their normal area of treatment.”
Board papers detail: “The trust has agreed, with patients’ consent, for a small number of bariatrics patients to be treated at Northumbria.”
The trust says there is a national target to eliminate the two-year waiting list by the end of June, but says there is some doubt that this will happen – with the organisation currently forecasting it will still have 21 patients on the list at June 26.
Ms Martin said: “We remain concerned about the waits in the emergency department and the increased delays to be discharged from care. We have got some real problems in terms of capacity.”
Trust board papers say that the urgent and emergency system “continues to be under significant pressure”. It details: “A key risk is the extent to which we can reduce, with partners, the number of people who are medically fit for discharge which has increased significantly through the winter period and now stands at approximately 13 per cent of our bed base.
“This continues to hamper our ability to manage flow effectively across the urgent and emergency care pathway and creates challenges within our emergency departments, which in turn impacts on ambulance handovers. Significant workforce challenges remain across both emergency departments and exit blocks causing delays in getting patients admitted.”
Dr Magnus Harrison, the trust’s interim chief executive, told the board: “The operational pressures we are experiencing at the moment – we mentioned the impact on emergency care and as a result of that in our planned care pathways too. This is being felt across the entirety of the health and care system in Derbyshire and Staffordshire.
“There has been an escalation in the Derbyshire area and that has been a worry for me and the team over the last couple of months, really peaking around Easter time.”
Trust board papers show that the organisation hit a new record high of 183 patients having waited on hospital trolleys, pending a vacant bed, for more than 12 hours.
Before the pandemic a single person breaching this length of wait for a bed would have been the subject of an investigation. Meanwhile, figures for March show that fewer than two out of every three patients are being seen in A&E within four hours – 62.2 per cent.
Figures also show that 17.84 per cent of patients were being seen within 60 mins at Queen’s Hospital in Burton and 26.7 per cent at Royal Derby Hospital.