The Worcestershire Royal Hospital has been forced to call in extra help to assist with the under-pressure A&E department.
On Friday 10th April, the hospital took the “unprecedented” move of bringing in a medical incident officer.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said it is not aware of this ever happening before.
Medical incident officers are normally reserved for major disasters, such as the firework warehouse explosion which happened in Stafford in October.
The doctor, who has not been named, was called upon after West Midlands Ambulance Service demanded action be taken over the long delays in A&E.
Patients were being left in the hands of paramedics for hours on end. This included one who was left for four hours despite having had a seizure, and another with heart-related chest pain who waited five hours to be seen.
“Crisis in A&E”
A senior clinical member of staff said: “The problem at the moment is that the Worcestershire hospital is far too small. They can’t cope with the number of admissions or the number of walk-in patients that turn up in A&E.”
“These things mean we have ended up with a crisis in A&E. They have now drawn little rectangles into the corridors to signify that is a corridor bed.”
“It’s incredibly stressful. It becomes a Third World situation where only the very sickest patients can be treated properly.”
This not the first time the hospital’s A&E department has been publically criticised. In February five emergency specialists resigned from the Trust saying “massive overcrowding” was causing patients “serious harm”.
In March the BBC revealed that two cardiac arrests had occurred in the hospital’s corridors in the same week, while all routine surgery was cancelled over the Easter holiday to free up bed space.
Negligent emergency care
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