Walsall Manor Hospital in £305,000 bid to ease A&E pressure
Health chiefs have made a desperate bid for more than a quarter of a million pounds of funding to help relieve pressure on Walsall Manor Hospital's under-pressure A&E department this winter.
The Black Country has been awarded a £605,272 grant for urgent and emergency care and Walsall Clinical Commissioning Group have applied for more than half of that - £305,272.
They say the money would go towards creating additional same-day GP appointments, reduce waiting times for patients being streamed from A&E to urgent care, pay for additional acute physician support, fund another A&E consultant for weekends, extra junior doctors to help discharge patients and extra nursing home beds.
The CCG has claimed the package of investment would improve the four-hour waiting time performance to more than 85 per cent through December, January and February. For September it was at 81 per cent while there was also one 12-hour trolley wait.
Andy Rust, strategy lead at the CCG, said: "The proposals set out in the submission are in recognition of the current pressures on the system and aim to deliver specific interventions designed to increase the impact of attendance and admission avoidance schemes, accelerate the flow of patients through the Emergency Department and inpatient wards, and provide additional capacity in the discharge pathways.
"There is also a proposal to fund the work underway to support the further development of the A&E Delivery Board."
The application comes after it was revealed that Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the Manor, had been fined £257,000 this year due to the amount of people who have had to wait longer than four hours in A&E to be dealt with.
Out of the £305,000 applied for the largest amount would be £78,000 to fund acute physician support for A&E.
A report said: "Acute Physician support in the A&E Department would enable more effective reduction of breaches between non-admitted and admitted patients with more senior clinical presence for managing patient flow across A&E, ambulatory and assessment pathways.
"This has recently been trialled on a one off basis within Manor Hospital with some success and so this proposal is to implement the scheme for 20 weeks from 30 October 2017."
The next biggest investment would be £75,000 to fund extra space in community care.
The report added: "There are currently some patients who are medically fit for discharge who could be transferred in to the supported discharge pathways if there was additional capacity."
