The “black
alert” is the highest and is issued when a hospital is “struggling or unable to
deliver comprehensive care” and patient safety is at risk.
Hospital has issued a ‘black alert’ as hundreds of patients flooded its A&E department – days after doctors across the NHS warned of pressure from record admissions.
Barnsley
Hospital found itself at breaking point as the number of patients arriving at
its emergency department each day passed 300, according to internal emails seen
by The Independent.
The South
Yorkshire hospital was forced to declare OPEL 4 status – referring to
“operational pressures escalation level” – on Tuesday as it struggled to find
beds.
An email to
staff warned of the already “pretty challenging” bed position, with more than
40 patients in the emergency department, 15 of whom were awaiting a bed.
This had
escalated to 80 patients waiting in the emergency department by the evening,
including 20 awaiting medical beds that were unavailable.
The spike in
patient numbers is due to A&E sickness demand rather than Covid-related,
The Independent understands.
The hospital’s
acute medical unit was also said to be full on Tuesday morning, with 12
patients in the emergency department awaiting placement and only two beds
available within the “medical bed base”.
An update
later in the day told staff the hospital was being moved to OPEL 4 status as
the trust was experiencing “severe pressures due to the flow of emergency
patients into and through the hospital”.
Staff were
encouraged to “do everything possible” to free up beds, including early reviews
of all inpatients and “encouraging medical teams to facilitate discharge”.
It comes
after The Independent revealed that hospital emergency departments across the
UK have been experiencing record numbers of patients, raising fears lives could
be lost.
A&E
doctors revealed that in some units patients were waiting as long as nine hours
to be seen, with overall numbers up by 50 per cent compared with pre-pandemic
levels.
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