How Sheffield hospitals rank compared to others in England, including A&E waiting times, amid NHS 'crisis'
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The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has told how nationally patients are dying in corridors and sometimes lying undiscovered for hours, according to shocking new accounts from nursing staff.
The RCN said more than two thirds (66.81 per cent) of NHS nursing staff responding to a new survey said they were delivering care in overcrowded or unsuitable places, including corridors, converted cupboards and even car parks, on a daily basis.
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More than nine in ten (90.82 per cent), meanwhile, said patient safety was being compromised.
The RCN said the survey’s findings exposed the true scale of what it branded the ‘corridor care crisis’ in the nation’s hospitals.
How Sheffield’s hospitals compare with rest of South Yorkshire
A report in the Telegraph includes an online tool allowing readers to compare their local hospital trust to others across England, based on official data.
According to that, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, which runs the Northern General Hospital, the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Weston Park Cancer Centre and the Jessop Wing maternity unit, ranks 75th out of 118 trusts in England.
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The online checker states that the trust is performing better than the national average when it comes to trolley waits and the backlog for appointments, but it is below average for A&E waiting times and the time taken for patients to start their cancer treatment.
The tool also ranks hospital trusts based on ambulance waiting times locally, which it says are better than the national average, though Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) is responsible for that.
According to the Telegraph’s online checker, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals ranks lower than the other hospital trusts in South Yorkshire and in neighbouring Chesterfield.
The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust is ranked 35th, Barnsley Hospital is 40th, Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals is 55th, and Chesterfield Royal Hospital is 63rd.
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Hide AdA&E waiting times, appointments backlog and cancer treatment
The Telegraph’s figures show that at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, 0.2 per cent of patients wait more than 12 hours between the decision for an emergency admission and actually being admitted to an appropriate ward. That’s significantly better than the national average of 9.8 per cent.
More than two thirds (38 per cent) of appointments have been in the backlog for more than 18 weeks, which is again better than the national average of 41 per cent.
But 31 per cent of patients wait more than four hours in A&E, which is worse than the national average of 27.9 per cent.


And 18.5 per cent of patients wait more than 31 days to start their cancer treatment, which is well above the national average of 8.5 per cent.
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Hide AdThe average waiting time for an emergency category 2 ambulance is 37 minutes, which is 10 minutes longer than the target but better than the national average of 42 minutes.
‘Staff working exceptionally hard’
Kirsten Major, chief executive of Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Before the pandemic we had some of the best elective waiting times in the NHS and our teams have been working exceptionally hard to recover that position.
“Like most other NHS trusts, catching up the backlog of care and also managing the huge increase in emergency and planned care since COVID has been challenging especially given we one of the largest trusts caring for over 2 million patients each year.
“We are also a specialist centre for many very complex conditions which cannot be treated elsewhere and this impacts on waiting times too for some conditions.
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Hide Ad“Giving all our patients good quality, timely care is our top priority and so to recover our good position we have invested in more staff and additional capacity which I am pleased to say is having a positive impact.”
A&E ‘exceptionally busy’
On Friday, January 17, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals said the A&E department at the Northern General Hospital was ‘exceptionally busy’ with waiting times of ‘several hours’.
It urged people only to attend if they had a serious or life-threatening injury, with everyone else advised to consider alternatives, including the NHS 111 helpline, the Broad Lane walk-in centre, where waiting times were between an hour and one hour 30 minutes, or the minor injuries department at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, where waiting times were similar.
For more details of urgent care options in Sheffield, visit: https://sheffieldurgentcare.co.uk/.
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