THIS winter's flu epidemic has stretched services at Airedale hospital to the limit.

The flu bug and other winter pressures have led to a 7.7 per cent increase in the number of emergency admissions compared to the same period last year.

The virus has also led to an increase in the number of staff unable to work due to sickness and a large increase in the number of patients left waiting for treatment on trolleys.

The 147 extra emergency admissions have contributed to the cancellation of 80 elective and non-urgent operations compared to 19 cancellations last winter.

However, the hospital has not been forced to cancel any of its non-elective surgery for people with more serious conditions such as cancer.

Director of nursing and quality Sue Franks said: "The pressures we started feeling were in mid November and this quarter we've had 64 complaints compared to about usually 40 complaints, which is indicative of the serious pressures.

"Accidents and Emergency and triage did quite well, despite the number of patients coming through."

Mrs Franks also revealed that the increase in patients had led to a rise in the number of people waiting on trolleys longer than the specified waiting time of one hour from admission. The national standard is two hours.

"In previous quarters there has been 13 breaches of the trolley waiting time compared to 121 breaches this quarter, nine of which had to wait more than four hours for treatment.

"At the beginning of January we had plenty of emergency beds because we had run down elective services and it was only when we started to reintroduce elective surgery in the first week of January that we got back up to full steam.

"But by January 14, we had 34 breaches of trolley waiting times, 10 of whom had waited for more than four hours.

"In terms of our community services, things, for example, like our rapid response services, are working at full stretch, so we are discussing the possibility of a second rapid response team.

"Despite this demonstrable increase in work load pressures our staff have coped well and I think it's fair to say morale is still quite high, which is good in terms of the adversity they are facing."

Medical director Dr Paul Godwin lays the blame for the pressures firmly at the feet of the Government for failing to provide adequate funding.

He said: "The reason we have the problems is that we don't have enough beds to cope with easily recognisable peaks in the UK.

"It isn't a crisis, because it can be predicted every year, and it is totally avoidable by funding enough beds and staff to cope with this issue."

Before the onset of winter, more than 600 of the hospitals 3,000 staff were immunised against the flu bug. Dr Tom Gibson asked the trust board if it could analyse the figures to see if the immunisation had any positive effect.

Mrs Franks said that because other members of staff could have been immunised by their GP's out of work, the effectiveness would be difficult to monitor. Mrs Franks and director of planning and marketing Doug Farrow also expressed their thanks to all members of staff for their hard work.

Opinion p10

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