Hundreds more patients go to A&E as bosses reveal 'staggering' figures

The number of people who went to the emergency centre at the Wednesfield site went up by more than seven per cent in April.

That equates to 705 more people coming through the doors at the hospital, which is having a new £30 million emergency centre built that should be open by November 2015.

Part of the increase has been put down to an increase in patients using the department from the Staffordshire area.

Chief Executive David Loughton said the numbers are staggering.

He said: "They just keep going up. It's just staggering. I want to know when it is going to stop because we are acting as a primary care function at the moment.

"There is something fundamentally wrong at the moment. Part of it is the number of GPs that are available, but we are going to come under enormous pressure over the next year due to the general election.

"We will pay to get out of it. The die has been cast if we don't get significant reductions. We will end up spending a fortune in the private sector."

The figures, which were revealed at the board meeting of the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, also showed that the number of times people were taken to hospital in an ambulance was up by almost eight per cent.

However, despite the increase in people attending A&E, the number of people having to wait longer than four hours to be seen has fallen.

In April 2013, 801 people waited longer than four hours to be seen, but that dropped to 647 for April this year.

Gwen Nuttall, chief operating officer at the trust, said: "First and foremost people need to be treated at the right time and they get a quality service."

Work has now started on the new A&E centre, which is set to open next year.

Dr Jonathan Odum, the medical director at the trust, said: "I am absolutely confident that this will be a great shot in the arm for the city of Wolverhampton, not just the organisation."

Preparatory work had been carried out on the site before the final £10 million of funding had been secured, which Mr Loughton said was a brave decision to make.

He added: "It puts us in an unbeatable position. I think it was a brave decision to clear the site before we got the funding."

The chief executive said last week that the new A&E would be one of the finest of its kind in the country.

The three-storey centre, being built by Kier Construction, will house a Clinical Decisions Unit for patients with relatively minor injuries and ailments, as well as an outpatients' clinic.

Other areas of the building will include dedicated radiology and x-ray facilities for emergency patients along with consulting space for GPs.

It is intended that overcrowded waiting rooms will be a thing of the past as patients who automatically go to A&E when they don't need to will be redirected elsewhere in the building.

The overall aim to to bring all emergency services – which are currently spread out across the News Cross site – under one roof.