New measures for dealing with emergency cases introduced at Airedale General Hospital have helped staff cope with the boom in admissions as the flu bug bites.

Figures are not yet available but bosses say admissions to the Steeton hospital are substantially up on the same period last year.

But staff say they are coping and no emergency admission had been turned away, thanks to new measures introduced in December financed by a £290,000 Government hand-out.

Trusts throughout the country received extra Whitehall cash in the autumn to tackle waiting lists and to free more hospital beds.

Doug Farrar, Airedale NHS Trust director of planning, said: "Coping with the levels of admission over the Christmas period has not been easy. People have been under considerable pressure and working very hard, but we have been successful so far.''

He said the new measures had enabled the trust to employ 25 to 30 extra staff to run a new ward where emergency admissions were assessed and patients diagnosed before being sent on to speciality wards.

It helped the hospital to get a quicker turn-round of patients and so free more hospital beds.

Arrangements had also been made with primary care organisations and social services to ensure which people needed to come into hospital and to prevent delay in discharging people back home or into the community. The new measures would be reviewed before a decision on how the system would be tackled in the next financial year. The Government money had been to cover just 12 months.

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