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Mayday from Mayday as A&E declares “major incident”

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Mayday is in the bottom 50 performing hospitals in the country, at a time when NHS hospital accident and emergency departments are performing worse than at any time in the past decade, figures from the Department of Health released today show.

The statistics came on the day when the re-branded Croydon University Hospital sent out a mayday of its own, declaring an “internal major incident” because of the level of demand on its A&E department – forcing them to admit more patients than there are available beds. Croydon’s hospital is one of a number of A&Es around the country to be overwhelmed by rising demand for its services.

Mayday’s official action comes after an elderly patient reported being kept on a trolley in a corridor of the London Road hospital for 12 hours on Saturday night, waiting for treatment.

“Today’s news confirms exactly what local people have been telling me for weeks,” Steve Reed OBE, the local Labour MP, said. The hospital has one of London’s busiest A&E departments, “but they’re now so overwhelmed by surging demand they can’t admit any more patients.

Steve Reed OBE: concerned by crisis in our NHS

“Only this morning a local woman in her 80s called my office to say that she had waited 12 hours on a trolley bed in a hospital corridor on Saturday night because the A&E was too busy to treat her.

“The Government has created an A&E crisis across Britain and, tragically, it’s now hit our local hospital.”

Other hospital trusts around the country have been forced to activate major incident plans to cope with a surge in demand at emergency departments at Gloucester Royal, Cheltenham General Hospital, Scarborough Hospital and the University Hospitals of North Midlands in Staffordshire.

According to Whitehall figures released today, Mayday’s A&E waiting times between October and December 2014 saw only 87.6per cent of patients seen within four hours. Government guidelines call for 95 per cent of patients to be seen within the four-hour target time.

NHS England this morning released figures showing that its hospitals had seen patients within four hours in only 92.6 per cent of cases.

This is a fall on the worst performance recorded since the ConDems came to power and is the lowest recorded over the last 10 years.

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