Senior health leaders say they are in a worse position than usual to deal with the anticipated busy winter ahead.<\/p>\n
At a meeting on Thursday, Louise Johnson, deputy director of urgent and emergency care at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust said it had been a “very, very difficult summer” giving staff no time to “decompress and recover” from the previous winter.<\/p>\n
It means the usual efforts to reduce the number of patients staying in hospital, in preparation for the expected influx of people during the autumn and winter, has not been achieved as in previous years.<\/p>\n
Johnson told the Health Overview Scrutiny Committee: “We are concerned about the position we have found ourselves in.”<\/p>\n
Winter is always a busier time for the NHS, with more cases of respiratory infections, and trips and falls as the temperatures drop. <\/p>\n
But the summer can provide some time for hospitals to prepare, by moving people out of hospital more quickly and reducing the number of beds, in preparation for a gradual increase over the autumn.<\/p>\n
Johnson said this approach has “put us in a much stronger position to encounter the winter pressures” over the last two years, but they have been unable to do it this year.<\/p>\n
Statistics show the John Radcliffe Hospital saw an 8% rise in people seeking treatment during June and July.<\/p>\n
Similar peaks were recorded at the Horton General Hospital in Banbury, in April and May, with people feeling the effects of the hot summer weather. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Senior health leaders say they are in a worse position than usual to deal with the anticipated busy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":768375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-768374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768374","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=768374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/768375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}