Confirmed: Health bosses to vote on night-time closure of Telford A&E
Shropshire health bosses are to be be asked to approve a night-time closure of Telford's accident and emergency department tomorrow.
A recommendation will be made to the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) board tomorrow to temporarily close the A&E at Princess Royal Hospital between 8pm and 8am.
The overnight closure could be brought in as soon as next month if the proposal is approved.
The trust says it is due to staffing shortages, with major gaps in consultants and middle-grade doctors.
SaTH, which runs PRH and Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, says the recommendation has been taken on balance considering the numbers of patients attending both sites overnight, as well as the mix and dependencies of other patient services at each hospital.
If the proposal is approved, A&E at PRH will be closed to ambulance admissions at 8pm and ambulances will be diverted to neighbouring trusts.
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The urgent care centre will accept patients until 8pm and the hospital will continue to accept GP referred admissions in those specialities managed at PRH between 8am and 8pm, seven-days-a-week
Stroke patients arriving by ambulance will be admitted to the appropriate clinical ward.
Simon Wright, chief executive at SaTH, said: “Though this is a very complex change to make, we’re doing it for patient safety. We haven’t arrived at this position lightly.
Demand
"We must once again emphasise that we have done everything we can to avoid reaching this point, including continued national and international recruitment for medical and nursing staff and extending the recruitment of emergency nurse practitioners.
"We have reviewed shift patterns in order to best meet times of high demand.”
Dr Kevin Eardley, consultant renal physician and medical director for unscheduled care, said: “We will be taking all steps possible to ensure that our plan minimises the impact of additional travel for patients, but we have to put patient safety first.
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“The proposal will clearly have an impact on other services – including women and children’s services, stroke services, critical care and head and neck services – but our plans have been created and tested to ensure the impact on our patients is kept to the absolute minimum.
“This is not something we ever wanted to implement, however, the care of our patients must come before every other consideration, and we cannot continue to look after our population safely, kindly and with the dignity they deserve with our current staffing levels and the demand we face every day.”
A date for the temporary overnight closure is still to be decided but the trust says it is most likely to be in the second half of October or early November.
The trust says any overnight suspension of A&E services will be kept under review.
