Shropshire Greens call on county's MPs to sort out hospitals crisis
Shropshire's Green Party is calling on the county's MPs to help end the crisis at the county's hospitals by demanding more community support and home and residential care for those waiting to leave hospital.
South Shropshire Green Party's 'Healthy Greens' team found that, over a recent 12-month period, the delayed discharges of patients following their treatment at Shropshire's main hospitals amounted to the equivalent of the loss of 53 years of unavailable but vitally-needed inpatient hospital beds.
The research showed that in 12 months to October last year, 19,560 bed days were lost for incoming patients. Recovering patients, though fit to move from hospital, were unable to be discharged to a clinically safe setting.
The team says the lost bed days could and should have accommodated 4,347 patients leaving A&E for inpatients' beds.
Healthy Greens' co-lead and senior nurse Clare Nash, said this was not the fault of the main hospitals, which must ensure patients are discharged to a safe setting.
"It is the failure of Government, to ensure enough appropriate 'step-down' provision for recovering patients," she said.
"The care sector in Shropshire is in severe stress from patients' care needs not being met with adequate supply."
Shropshire councillor and former A&E sister Julia Evans said "No wonder our Shropshire A&E's cannot meet the national target to transfer patients into a hospital bed.
"Over 12 months over 14,000 patients could not be moved from A&E into inpatients.
"So the way out of A&E is blocked, which means that the way into A&E is blocked, so ambulances cannot unload seriously ill patients into A&E, so ambulances queue outside our two emergency hospitals and as a consequence [are] unavailable to attend the next seriously ill or injured patient."
"What a terrible mess, delivering unacceptable stress for patients their families and valiant medical staff and delayed emergency care with fatal risks."
The research found that Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust also had significant delays in the 12 months to December 2021.
Councillor Evans added: "More than three quarters of patients were occupying rehabilitation beds when fit enough to move on elsewhere and 30 of these patients were 'super-stranded', still in hospital three weeks after being assessed as fit for discharge. Again lack of rehabilitation and social care capacity was the cause, and remains unacceptably so today."
John Crowe, co-lead of Healthy Greens said: "Shropshire's hospital managers and board members and chairs have long known from their own data, that the knotted string of bottlenecks within the patient's hospital journey arises from lack of social care capacity into which to discharge recovering patients."
"Shropshire's health trust chairs and board members must adopt a much stronger voice to ensure their hospitals can discharge patients as soon as fit enough. Also, Shropshire Council, and Telford & Wrekin Council must 'do what it takes' together with our five Shropshire MPs to provide sufficient appropriate capacity to put right this for-ever system failure."
Councillor Evans and the Shropshire Greens 'Healthy Greens' team have written to all five Shropshire MPs asking what actions are they pursuing to deal with "unacceptable, and dangerous situation".
