Hospital trust in charge of St Albans City Hospital failed to meet multiple NHS care targets

Information released by West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust this week shows the health authority slipped in a total of 27 service targets across several departments in January.

In some cases the trust, which serves St Albans, Watford and Hemel Hempstead, failed to meet waiting time targets by more than 50 per cent.

West Herts chiefs said January was "an exceptionally busy and challenging month for us".

In A&E, the trust missed the constitutional NHS four-hour wait target by almost 12 per cent - meanwhile the amount of time paramedics were spending out of action in the hospital filling out paperwork and completing the clinical handover was above the operational standard of 30 minutes.

Some 663 instances were noted in January of ambulance turnovers at West Herts hospitals taking more than 30 minutes - with 214 of those instances recorded as taking more than an hour.

Patients were also not admitted to the stroke unit within four hours of arrival at the hospital, missing the 90 per cent target by nearly 55 per cent.

Surgery too faced problems after 13 West Herts patients in January were not treated within 28 days of a last-minute cancelled operations.

West Herts also missed several cancer targets, including the time between GP referral and treatment, which was 62 days in only 69 per cent of cases, but the NHS target is 85 per cent.

Referrals to consultant-led services were also far below NHS standards during January, with only 69 per cent of patients already admitted to the hospital waiting the target amount of time before treatment or discharge - it should be 90 per cent.

Lynn Hill, the trust's deputy chief executive, said: "The A&E waiting time figures in our most recent board papers show that over the month of January 2015, 83.1 per cent of patients using our A&E services were seen, treated, admitted or discharged within a maximum of four hours.

"While it is disappointing that we did not meet the national standard 95 per cent, we were extremely busy, like most other hospitals across the country.

"In January, 10,243 people used our A&E at Watford Hospital, our urgent care centre at Hemel Hempstead Hospital and our minor injuries unit at St Albans Hospital.

"Of these, 6,686 used our A&E at Watford with many seriously ill and requiring admission to our hospitals. This unusually high number of attendances had a significant impact on other factors such as our ambulance turnover times, and scheduled operations.

"Unfortunately, during January, we had to cancel 13 operations. Cancellations usually happen because either a bed, or operating theatre time, is not available due to very unwell patients coming in through A&E at Watford requiring emergency admission/surgery.

"We have a number of immediate actions which have been or are being implemented to improve the performance in these critical hospital areas such as A&E, in order to ensure our patients continue to be given the best quality care, under challenging circumstances.

"These include the opening of two new winter wards at Watford in January, which has provided us with 36 additional beds. Also planning extra capacity at St Albans Hospital so that we can carry out more elective operations there.

"Similarly, we are making changes to the way that we manage in-patients at Watford Hospital so that their care pathway is more efficient, which will at the same time deliver real improvements to our patients’ experience and moving towards six or seven day working in hospital services, such as outpatients, which traditionally are open Monday to Friday."