Dr Jim reflects on ‘extraordinary numbers of patients’ at the Trust

Jim GardnerEarlier this week, Dr Jim Gardner, Medical Director at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals Trust, used his weekly video blog to talk about some of the incredible pressures which the Trust is currently facing in both the Emergency Department, and also across the Trust with discharging patients.

You can read Dr Jim’s comments on the pressures below. We expect another busy weekend across all our NHS services so please consider the right healthcare option, that could be Self Care, your local Pharmacy or NHS111. Please save the Emergency Department for those who absolutely need it.

“We declared what we call an internal major incident on Monday because of the department being so busy and we’ve seen numbers up to as many as 130 patients in the department at any one time and of course our worry then is the department becomes unsafe for people coming in,” Dr Gardner said.

“We’re doing everything we can internally to optimise and improve patient flow through the department out into our wards but we’ve been experiencing extraordinary numbers of patients coming in so we’ve been working with the ambulance trust for example to cohort patients in a separate space so that ambulances are not queuing outside. We’ve been working ever so hard to try and make sure that patients can be discharged appropriately from the back end of the hospital to maintain flow, but inevitably the request to everybody is to think very carefully before coming to an accident and emergency department and only come if there has been an accident or if there is an emergency.

“Be thoughtful about self-care, be thoughtful about seeking advice from local pharmacies, from GP services and of course NHS111 before thinking about maybe the need to dial 999 and call an ambulance or come straight to the department.

“I apologise to everybody because if you have been in and experienced that level of busyness, well it’s not the kind of service we aspire to deliver, it’s not what we all want for each other for our loved ones, for ourselves.

“I promise you we’re working ever so hard to try and resolve that but if we can all do our bit please that would be incredibly helpful.

“The other piece of that of course is the piece about discharges and so if you have a loved one in hospital at the moment and you can help them to get home because they’re medically fit to be home and maybe waiting for some social package of care it’s incredibly helpful to do that. We know that long lengths of stay in hospital are really not good for people, muscle bulk deconditions, there’s a risk of acquiring other infections and so on, so it is actually really important for people’s well-being to keep that movement going.”

You can watch Dr Jim’s weekly video message below.

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