SILHILLIANS are being asked to consider alternate urgent treatment options to help ease pressures on Accident and Emergency Departments (A&E).
This comes after it was revealed by the Liberal Democrat analysis of House of Commons Library research that 181,189 people waited over four hours in 2023 at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB).
The data also revealed that the number of patients who waited over 12 hours to be seen in A&E at Heartlands Hospital, Good Hope Hospital and Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, from 27 in 2019 to 17,941 in 2023.
UHB oversees the running of Solihull Hospital, Heartlands Hospital, Good Hope Hospital, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham.
A spokesperson for UHB said: “Our emergency departments (EDs) continue to be extremely busy and our teams are working tremendously hard to see and treat a large number of patients, in the safest and timeliest manner possible.
“There are long waiting times within emergency departments locally and nationally, and we would advise local people to consider if they could use a local urgent treatment centre, which are often able to see and treat patients with a wide variety of minor illnesses and injuries more quickly than they would experience in ED.”
This comes as the Liberal Democrats call on the government to reverse its near £5billion of real terms cuts to NHS funding over this year and next, and invest more in local health services including A&E.
Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Solihull West and Shirley, Ade Adeyemo, said: “Every year A&E delays keep getting worse under this Conservative government as hospitals in our area are starved of the funding they desperately need.
“These appalling delays are leaving often vulnerable and elderly patients in our area waiting for hours on end in overcrowded A&Es.
“Solihull deserves so much better than this”
