East Lancashire hospitals' red alert plan ‘not enough’

9:29am Wednesday 27th August 2008

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HOSPITAL bosses have revealed their emergency plan to cope with demand for beds – but a health scrutiny boss said it ‘left a lot to be desired’.

Figures obtained by the Lancashire Telegraph last month showed that the hospital trust was on ‘red alert’ status for capacity for an average of two-and-a-half days every week.

This prompted health watch-dog Coun Roy Davies to asked East Lancashire Hospitals Trust for further information on its emergency intensive care provision.

Coun Davies, who chairs Blackburn with Darwen Cou-ncil’s health scrutiny comm-ittee, was also prompted by the case of 80-year-old Muriel Gallagher who was left in trac-tion for more than four weeks awaiting an operation because critical care beds were not available.

In its reply, a spokesman for the hospital said if just two extra intensive care beds were needed, all patients in critical care would be reviewed to see whether they could be moved or discharged.

If no-one could be moved, theatre recovery beds would be converted to critical care as a contingency, meaning all operations in those theatres would have to be cancelled, and potential theatre places would be reduced for those needing emergency surgery.

Coun Davies said the plan ‘left a lot to be desired.’ He said: “Hospitals should have emergency capacity avail-able with real belt-and-braces plans.

“This just looks to be more like a ‘let’s hope for the best’ strategy and that’s not enough.

“My main concern with the reconfiguration has always been whether or not services will be able to cope, and there really should be somewhere other than theatre that we can have the extra intensive care beds if we need them.”

A spokesman for the hospitals said: “Dependent upon the scale of the incident, consideration would be given to stopping all major surgery in order to accommodate a greater number of intensive care patients within recovery.

“In addition, once the pat-ients were stable, if there was no potential to move to the critical care unit, an intensive care bed would be sought in another hospital and the patient would be transferred.

“In the event of a major incident the trust would invoke its plan that then involves the hospitals, partner organisations and other hospitals to ensure maximum capacity is available to care for patients.”

The ‘red alert’ figures included the Royal Blackburn Hospital, Burnley General Hospital, Pendle Community Hospital and Rossendale General Hospital.