Overnight closure looming for Telford's Princess Royal Hospital A&E

Staffing at PRH and Royal Shrewsbury Hospital’s A&E departments is still below the recommended level amount.

Health bosses are working up a contingency plan to deal with a situation in which services cannot continue in their present form.

And a meeting of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS Trust was told that tipping point would happen if one more member of staff were to resign or go long-term sick.

Debbie Kadum, chief operating officer at the trust, said: “There is currently a 30 per cent nursing staff vacancy at our A&Es and an increased risk in middle grade doctor staffing.

“At present, 50 per cent of our consultant rota relies on locums. We are planning to change the hours two of our locums work to evening working to make sure we have senior decision makers late.”

The trust insists that it is attempting to bring in new staff to deal with the crisis. It also says any night-time closure of the A&E department at the PRH would be temporary.

Ms Kadum said: “We continue to advertise but have had no applicants recently. If we receive a resignation of a substantive consultant or further reduction in middle grade doctors we will have to act on the plan to reduce hours at PRH’s A&E.”

£1 million overspend on trust agency staff

SaTH has spent about £1 million more on agency staff than planned.

Currently the trust has a deficit of £4.7 million, ahead of their forecast of a £3.7 million deficit.

At the meeting board members said one of the main reasons why they were further in the red than expected was due to spending more on agency staff than planned.

The board heard a total of 41 per cent of total agency spend of £10 million has already been spent in the first quarter of the year.

The problem follows a trend nationally in which hospitals are struggling to recruit permanent staff.

Clive Deadman, non-executive director at Sath, spoke at a board meeting of the trust.

He said: “We are struggling with the cost of agency staff.

“This is a financial and morale issue and we must find a way to tackle it.

“Come September we may need to look at putting people on reduced payment.”

Neil Nisbet, finance director, said: “There is a need for agency staff but improvements can be made.

“We could have used some agencies at a lower pay level.

“We are putting in arrangements to improve the amount we are spending such as block booking agencies so we can get better prices for agency nurses.

“Also working on discharging people quicker means we can rely on less agency nursing.”

Previously hospital bosses said they spent £16.373 million on agency staff in 2015/16, a figure which is ‘too high’.

Theresa May was earlier this month accused of overseeing “an unprecedented workforce crisis in the NHS“ after it emerged staff vacancies have risen by more than 10 per cent in the last year, with tens of thousands of posts left unfilled.

Official figures revealed that in March this year there were 30,613 vacant full-time positions advertised by NHS England – up from 26,424 in the same month in 2016 and 26,406 in 2015.

Labour said the Prime Minister was taking health service staff for granted and warned that a repeat of last winter’s chaotic scenes, which saw A&E patients lined up on trolleys for hours, would be “simply intolerable”.

Nearly 40 per cent of the vacancies in March 2017 were for NHS nursing and midwifery positions, of which there were 11,485 adverts in total. The average nursing or midwifery role is only drawing three applications, the figures show.

“NHS staffing levels are reaching crisis point,” claimed Janet Davies, head of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).

“At the very moment the NHS needs to be recruiting more nursing staff, we learn the number is falling and the NHS finds itself advertising for more jobs we know it cannot fill.”