A&E expansion 'will bring benefits by Christmas' amid 'highest ever' levels of activity
Shropshire's A&Es are seeing their "highest ever" levels of activity although work at Royal Shrewsbury's emergency department will help expand capacity by Christmas, bosses have revealed.
A total of £9.3m is being spent on the project, which will significantly improve facilities and allow more patients to be seen, and bosses have revealed that the benefits are likely to be seen by the end of the year.
It comes as the trust's hospitals are currently caring for about 20 Covid patients.
However chief operating officer Nigel Lee told a meeting of the hospitals' board of directors that admissions are expected to rise this month.
"The expectation is that critical care admissions will rise through August and probably peak at about the third week of August," he said.
"We continue to work as a regional network to support across the centres. We have taken a couple of patients from the Birmingham area in the last week and that is about spreading the load and maintaining time critical surgery."
He told board members of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust that in June the hospitals had seen their "highest ever" levels of A&E activity and that staff were doing a huge amount of work to try and mitigate the pressures.
Figures show there were 570 occasions in June where ambulances were waiting over an hour to handover patients at the trust's hospitals.
"The A&E teams continually work closely with the ambulance service," Mr Lee said.
"We do therefore sometimes take patients off ambulances out of order where the clinical prioritisation dictates."
He said the physical capacity of the sites, particularly at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, has created challenges in managing the volume of patients, but work is taking place to expand capacity which he revealed would be in place by Christmas time.
The pandemic has also led to record waiting lists for patients requiring planned operations and procedures but Mr Lee said a new imaging pod, which will house MRI and CT scanners, is also being built at RSH.
It will be used for outpatients requiring a diagnostic test.
He added: "We were assessed by NHS Improvement both nationally and regionally when we looked at the relative capacity of imaging equipment and we were awarded one CT and one MRI scanner and a building which we've called a pod.
"The building should be finished in early September.
"The current prediction is that we should be able to bring that into operation in October. It will be a permanent fixture."
