City hospital to go ‘back to the drawing board’

The trust which runs Peterborough City Hospital needs to go “back to the drawing board” to find a solution to an unexpected rise in patients, its chief executive admitted.

Stephen Graves said there was a “real concern” due to missed A&E waiting times and bed-blocking during Monday night’s Health Scrutiny Committee meeting at Peterborough City Council.

A week after the Peterborough Telegraph laid bare the city’s underfunding from the government, the meeting revealed:

. A&E waiting times at the North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust - which runs Peterborough, Stamford and Hinchingbrooke hospitals fell from 90 per cent last July to below 70 per cent in December, before rising to 78 per cent

. At peak times 100 patients can be bed-blocking

. There was an increase in emergency admissions of “well over 10 per cent” between November 2017 and January 2018 compared to the same time a year earlier

. A new report is set to reveal the East of England Ambulance Service requires additional funding for sever- al hundred more staff due to a “significant capacity gap”

. 43 per cent of ambulance handovers at Peterborough City Hospital in December were longer than 30 minutes, leading to delays in responding to 999 calls.

Peterborough City Hospital has 600 beds compared to 1,200 at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, but receives roughly the same number of ambulances a day, according to Mr Graves. He is hoping to open up 100 new beds, but said it would require “quite a lot of money from the Treasury” and would face problems with recruitment, with the hospital struggling in certain departments to find agency doctors.

Peterborough City Hospital