Lincolnshire hospitals “reasonably confident” critical incident will end before Christmas

United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust chief executive Andrew Morgan has said he is “reasonably confident” the trust will come out of its critical incident state when a review takes place later on Thursday.

Mr Morgan said he could not be “overly optimistic” about the situation, but said hospitals were “holding up well” despite the pressures from high demand and ambulance staff strikes.

The trust is aiming to get as many patients home for Christmas as possible.

ULHT’s critical incident was declared due to “significant pressure” on Tuesday night – before strikes by East Midlands Ambulance Service were due to begin. The strikes ended at 6am on Thursday.

Mr Morgan said Wednesday went “as well as we could have expected”.

Despite fewer ambulances attending, patient numbers for the highest priority category were only 5% down at Accident and Emergency departments.

The trust put in “significant mitigation measures” including focusing staff on rapid ambulance handovers and beefing up senior decision making in A&Es.

“We did everything we could to be ready for this and get as many discharges out as possible because, as ever, it’s always about the flow in our hospital.

“We’re still in critical incident but we’re going to review that towards the end of the day. We’re in a relatively good position, there are more ambulances than yesterday but we’ve not been swamped with that.”

However, he said that did not mean the trust was empty adding: “We’re not, we’re still very busy, we still have a number of patients waiting for a bed.”

Mr Morgan added that the trust’s “Breaking the Cycle” scheme, which aims to improve patient discharge speed in order to create knock on space all the way back to the entrance, had also held up.

“We’re still maintaining that and we’ve still got a strong focus on a Home for Christmas approach, so those people who don’t need to be in hospital for the festive period we get them home – it’s right for them, and it’s right for the patients who will need to be in hospital that we have the capacity to do that.”

He acknowledged some more work would need to be done on giving confidence, however, to patients who were concerned about being discharged after several refused to go home on Wednesday.

The trust now faces a bank holiday, festive weekend, before a second day of strike action is set to take place next Wednesday.