Staffordshire NHS trust closer to hitting A&E wait target

University Hospitals of North Midlands has been seeing around 70 per cent of A&E patients within four hours in recent weeks, compared to an NHS target of 76 per cent, and up from a low of 56 per cent in December 2022.

NHS England has told all hospital trusts that they need to hit the 76 per cent target by the end of March – something UHNM has not achieved since April 2021. UHNM, which runs the Royal Stoke and County Hospital in Stafford, and the wider Staffordshire NHS is expected to miss out on around £2.9 million of incentive funding, tied to achieving 80 per cent over a three-month period.

Chief operating officer Simon Evans told a trust board meeting that UHNM continued to be one of the most improved hospitals in the country in terms of reducing A&E waits, but admitted that it still had ‘a long way to go’ to hitting the 76 per cent target in March. During the winter period, the proportion of patients seen within four hours had fallen from 70 per cent in September to 64.2 per cent in January.

But Mr Evans said performance had ‘improved substantially’ since the trust had declared two critical incidents in January and February, when demand on the emergency department had exceeded capacity.

He said: “A recent example, which is of note, is that we’ve had a day where we’ve had zero patients waiting for more than 12 hours in our emergency department. That is something that’s normally occurs on Christmas Day alone, and I’m pleased to say that we’ve had that during the February period. We’re now seeing a consistent reduction in the number people who are waiting for more than 12 hours.

“Nevertheless we still have a long way to go to achieve our 76 per cent target in March. We have started very well at the end of February and into March, we are consistently delivering high 60s and low 70s performance now. It’s continuing to improve. Our forecast for the end of March is still set at 76 per cent, and we are still ambitious in terms of wanting to deliver that. We’re probably closer to that than we’ve ever been, certainly in the last 12 months.”

Chief finance officer Mark Oldham told the board that no trust in England was currently on track to hitting the 80 per cent target, meaning a £150 million national incentive pot would go unclaimed. The board heard that NHS England was therefore in the process of reviewing the criteria.

Non-executive director Gary Crowe said that even if UHNM hit the 76 per cent target, this still represented ‘poor’ performance. He said: “While the national progress towards the 76 per cent objective sounds like progress on one level, that still means that even if you hit that target we’ve got a quarter of people not being seen in that time.

“I think that’s a really poor state of affairs for the country. So 76 per cent is not a good outcome compared to what we used to achieve in this country not so long ago.”