NHS bosses in charge of York Hospital have said they are ‘really concerned’ about emergency department waiting times becoming worse.
The chair of the York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has described a “wicked problem” of 12-hour trolley waits almost doubling from August to September in the organisation’s emergency departments.
The figures, which are for the trust as a whole including York and Scarborough hospitals, state that in September 645 people waited on ED trolleys for 12 hours whereas in August, that same figure was 388.
A meeting of the York and Scarborough NHS Trust on Wednesday was also told that the number of new complaints received remains high and is “almost three times the average pre-pandemic”.
A report to the directors stated: “Unsurprisingly, the majority of complaints relate to delayed treatment across services but complaints about staff attitude and poor communication also remain high.”
Martin Barkley, the chair of the trust, said he was particularly concerned by “the number of patients waiting on a trolley for more than 12 hours before leaving the department to then usually be admitted”.
He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “The number is still almost less than half of what it was in December but nevertheless it as gone up by a couple of hundred between August and September and it’s the first time those numbers have moved in the wrong direction in this calendar year, to the best of my recollection.”
Asked why that was the case, he said: “Usually, it is due to the lack of available beds when a patient needs to be admitted… and there has also been an increase in the number of occupied bed days by patients who are ready to be discharged.”
A pledge in the NHS Constitution states that at least 95 per cent of patients attending A&E should be admitted to hospital, transferred to another provider, or discharged within four hours.
According to the King’s Fund, the NHS has set interim targets for the four-hour standard to bridge the gap between current performance and the 95 per cent target.
The current NHS aim is for a minimum of 78 per cent of patients to be seen within four hours by March 2025.
Chair, Mr Barkley, noted that there were lots of patients ready to be discharged who were deemed physically fit to leave but could not go home due to a lack of support in communities.
He added: “Many of these problems cannot be solved by the trust itself and we are working alongside local authority colleagues and voluntary sector organisations because it really is a collaborative approach that is required.”
Directors agreed that there should be a “deep dive” into the data to further examine what was leading to the issues.
The same report noted that the median wait time to initial assessment in ED remained unchanged at four minutes while the average ambulance handover time was 51 minutes compared to the target of 39 minutes.