{"id":297135,"date":"2025-12-03T17:58:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T17:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/297135\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T17:58:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T17:58:08","slug":"craigavon-hospital-wait-times-averaging-almost-19-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/297135\/","title":{"rendered":"Craigavon hospital: Wait times averaging almost 19 hours"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Dr Hampton thanked staff who were working &#8220;above and beyond&#8221;, but said the issue was not isolated to Craigavon&#8217;s ED.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He urged younger people who are normally fit and well and develop flu-like symptoms to stay at home, to not come to EDs unless absolutely necessary, and to use services like <a href=\"https:\/\/online.hscni.net\/our-work\/no-more-silos\/phone-first-faqs\/\" class=\"ssrcss-f6h2dj-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Phone First, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Public Health Agency (PHA) said there had been a large increase in flu cases in the past two weeks &#8211; with the highest amongst the 0-4 age group<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Dr Peter Naughton, a health protection consultant with the PHA, said the flu season started earlier this year, and there had been a higher number of cases.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Last week, we saw about 900 new cases of flu, which was about double what we had seen the previous week,&#8221; he told BBC News NI.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Of those [900], about 250 people ended up in hospital because of flu, which again was about a 50% in what we had seen in the previous week.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">BBC News NI understands that there are 30 adults hospitalised in Craigavon Area Hospital with flu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Hampton thanked staff who were working &#8220;above and beyond&#8221;, but said the issue was not isolated to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-297135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}