Challenging year as waiting times have increased at Shropshire's hospitals

The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust annual report gives an insight into the challenges experienced by the hospitals between March 2016 and March this year.

About 80 per cent of A&E patients were admitted or discharged within four hours at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Telford's Princess Royal.

Hospitals are expected to see 95 per cent of patients within four hours of their A&E attendance.

The report also reveals 17 patients waited more than 12 hours on trolleys in the A&E departments, and 561 last minute elective operations had to be cancelled for non-clinical reasons.

Meanwhile, ambulance staff were delayed for more than 30 minutes on 8,045 occasions at the hospitals, and for more than one hour on 1,575 occasions.

But the report does highlight the trust hit cancer waiting times targets.

Simon Wright, chief executive of the trust, said: "We have made great progress to improve our culture and our staff feel more able to report problems when they see them so that we can make improvements.

"In terms of our clinical outcomes over the past 12 months, we have performed well in key areas such as hitting all of our cancer waiting time targets and reducing the number of infections such as Clostridium difficile.

"However, it has been a challenging year and our patients have experienced growing waits for treatment.

"We regret this and have proposed to our communities ways we can fix this situation. This will require a lot of investment into the county and a great deal of change and reconfiguration of our services.

"Community leaders and stakeholders are continuing to consider these proposals, but while they think and reflect the pressures on our hospitals, staff and patients grow.

"The fragility of A&E and some of our other services came to the fore during the year but these issues are not new and, in fact, have been causing concern for the best part of a decade in some cases. The need to resolve the challenges these services face are the driving force behind our plans to reconfigure hospital services and to work more closely with our GPs.

"This is particularly important in end of life care where we have ensured over 1,700 staff are trained, opened Swan Rooms to support the families with a quiet space to grieve and our second conference with Roy Lilley joining the trust alongside over 250 people to help embed learning.

"We are taking decisive action, together with our partners, to remove risks and to introduce permanent and sustainable solutions to keep services here for future generations.

"We have set out a clear future that will bring state-of-the-art services into our county, protect those already here and encourage health professionals to want to come here to work and live."

In January patients waited more than 20 hours at Telford's Princess Royal Hospital's A&E department, and before the end of the month 7,000 patients had been seen in total at Shropshire two A&Es – around 300 patients per day.

At the height of the busiest period this winter, SaTH made repeated calls for people to stay away from the the hospitals unless they had a genuine emergency.

In April it was announced Shropshire's two main hospitals are to get a £1 million funding boost from the Government in a bid to help ease pressure on their A&E departments this winter.

The investment was announced by the Department of Health, which will see £55.98 million of a total £100 million A&E capital funding, outlined in the spring budget by the Chancellor Philip Hammond, to ease pressure on emergency departments in time for winter to prevent the departments reaching crisis point.