City hospital to go '˜back to the drawing board'

The trust which runs Peterborough City Hospital needs to go 'back to the drawing board' to find a solution to an unexpected rise in patients, its chief executive admitted.
Peterborough City Hospital exteriorsPeterborough City Hospital exteriors
Peterborough City Hospital exteriors

Stephen Graves said there was a “real concern” due to missed A&E waiting times and bed-blocking during Monday night’s Health Scrutiny Committee meeting at Peterborough City Council.

A week after the Peterborough Telegraph laid bare the city’s underfunding from the government, the meeting revealed:

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. A&E waiting times at the North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust - which runs Peterborough, Stamford and Hinchingbrooke hospitals - fell from 90 per cent last July to below 70 per cent in December, before rising to 78 per cent

. At peak times 100 patients can be bed-blocking

. There was an increase in emergency admissions of “well over 10 per cent” between November 2017 and January 2018 compared to the same time a year earlier

. A new report is set to reveal the East of England Ambulance Service requires additional funding for several hundred more staff due to a “significant capacity gap”

. 43 per cent of ambulance handovers at Peterborough City Hospital in December were longer than 30 minutes, leading to delays in responding to 999 calls.

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Peterborough City Hospital has 600 beds compared to 1,200 at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, but receives roughly the same number of ambulances a day, according to Mr Graves. He is hoping to open up 100 new beds, but said it would require “quite a lot of money from the Treasury” and would face problems with recruitment, with the hospital struggling in certain departments to find agency doctors.