Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin ICS declares a system critical incident

The Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin Integrated Care System has today (Tuesday 29 March 2022) declared a system critical incident. This is in relation to increasing numbers of patients with covid in our hospitals and extremely high levels of staff sickness across our health and care system.

There are two issues:

1. At the time of writing, we have 126 covid positive patients in hospital. This is causing significant pressure as we seek to care for and look after these poorly patients. This is the highest number we have had locally at any point of the pandemic.
2. We have an extremely high number of staff off from work with covid across the health and care system. Staff sickness overall is circa 8.4%. This is impacting on our ability to operate services

As a consequence of these challenges, we have ambulance delays at our acute hospitals. 

Safe discharge of patients is also proving challenging, despite the continued hard work and dedicated focus of our community and local authority partners. As an example today we have 35 care homes closed due to covid outbreaks in Shropshire and four in Telford & Wrekin. 

In addition and as further examples, eight local GP practices are operating business continuity plans due to covid staff sickness and both NHS111 and Shropdoc (our GP Out of Hours service) report staffing issues.

We are asking staff on leave to contact work to see if they are needed. 

We are also asking the public to wash hands, keep a distance and wear masks in crowded settings. 

We further ask patients to seek alternatives to attending A&E where appropriate. A&E remains open for emergencies and urgent care needs.

We are doing everything we can as a health and care system to rapidly improve the position and we apologise for any negative impact this has on an individual’s experience of our local health and care system.