How flu and December critical incident impacted performance at Birmingham and Solihull A&Es

Members of the University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB) NHS Foundation Trust Board heard how flu patients took up to 13 per cent of beds across the four main sites.

Whilst this had a knock-on effect for services at Queen Elizabeth, Heartlands, Solihull and Good Hope Hospitals, members heard how measures put in place to increase capacity helped bring a quick de-escalation which led to a ‘period of good performance’.

Iain Pickles, UHB chief operating officer said that in December the proportion of patients seen within four hours at A&Es and the urgent treatment centre in Solihull was 62.6 per cent.

This was two per cent down behind the trust’s plan but an improvement on the previous month.

And the number of patients spending more than 12 hours at UHB stood at 13 per cent – more than one per cent better than planned.

Mr Pickles said: “On urgent and emergency care, December was a challenging month. It was a mixed month from a performance perspective.

“As we started December, we had seen over the previous four or five weeks a rapid increase in the number of patients admitted into hospital.

“That peaked for UHB on December 7 with 294 in-patients with flu. That’s between 12 and 13 per cent of all of our occupied beds with patients with influenza.

“That put a huge amount of pressure across all of the hospitals. We subsequently declared a critical incident on December 8 in response to that.

“We did see a rapid de-escalation within our hospitals. That led to a period of reasonably good performance from the stand down of the critical incident and carried through to Christmas.

“The other thing that helped us during that period was the reduced attendances that we saw coming to our departments, which was clearly associated with the national media conversations around influenza and congestion within EDs [emergency departments].”