PCH No Longer Major Incident - But Extremely Busy

8 January 2015, 12:50 | Updated: 8 January 2015, 12:53

Peterborough City Hospital's come off Major Incident Status - and downgraded to Black Alert - which means they're still extremely busy.

In a statement released to Heart, the Trust says:

"Since Monday 5 January, our hospital has been under extreme pressure as a result of greater levels of emergency admissions and fewer patients being discharged.  We declared an internal major incident at 8.30am on Monday 5 January.  However, we have been able to step down our status to black alert today (Thursday 8 January). We would like to highlight that we still have patients within our emergency department that we are unable to allocate a hospital bed to in a timely way and we remain under sustained severe pressure.

We have had to cancel some planned operations again today in order to ensure beds are prioritised for emergency patients. We would like to apologise to those patients who have had their operations cancelled as we appreciate it causes them great inconvenience. We will be rescheduling these operations as a priority in the coming weeks.

Given the continued increase in demand for emergency treatment, we have to prioritise our patients attending the Emergency Department – which means treating the sickest patients first. Therefore it is likely that many non-urgent cases will be seen faster in other healthcare settings at the moment."

Dr Neil Modha, Chief Clinical Officer for the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group, said:

"We are asking the public consider where they go when they are feeling unwell and only use A&E or 999 when they are acutely unwell or have a  life-threatening condition.

The public can see their GP, or use their local Minor Injury or Illness units or walk-in centres. If their GP practice is closed they should contact the Out of Hours GP service first (by calling 111), or seek advice from their local pharmacist who is also there to help. If people are not sure where best to go, they should call NHS 111 and will receive advice and direction about the best place to be seen.”