BACK room staff  worked on wards to help Hereford County Hospital cope with a norovirus outbreak and “intense” pressure on A&E.

Over recent weeks, Wye Valley NHS Trust has lost around half of its beds and a number of its staff to norovirus.

The bug - which saw wards shut to admissions and visitors as patients showed symptoms - struck as the trust was struggling with a another big rise to in A&E attendances and emergency admissions that peaked at 20 per cent more than usual for the time of year.

 “It got to the point where we were holding emergency management meetings twice a day to look at where we were going to put all our patients, and another team was meeting daily to look at how we were managing the norovirus outbreak,” said Lisa Hunt, WVT chief operating officer.

“We knew the only way we were going to get through this was by managing our beds very efficiently and planning where we could move patients - in particular, keeping those patients free from norovirus in areas where there had been no sickness and diarrhoea to ensure they didn’t catch it while they were in our care,” she said.

This week, the trust board was told how non-clinical staff were drafted onto wards to help out with fetching, carrying and cleaning.

In a specific example, the board heard how the trust’s finance team boosted numbers to work as runners between wards to ensure medicines and tablets were being collected from the pharmacy.

Other anecdotes included the quality and safety team ensuring patients had enough to eat and drink and a volunteer back office “deep clean” crew working on wards affected by the bug.

No non-clinical staff were engaged in clinical tasks.

But in saluting the effort, the board was told by  trust medical director Dr Sally Stuke that bringing back office staff to the frontline meant back office work wasn’t being done.

The board heard that over late January-early February the trust – which had declared a “critical incident” over admissions - was starting to recover its four hour waiting time target for urgent care with delayed transfers of care reducing to a manageable level.

Then, over February 8-11, norovirus struck to shut Lugg Ward and Arrow Ward and close Ross Community Hospital to admissions and transfers as the trust went on “outbreak” alert.

With up to four wards closed to admission at the outbreak’s height, patient flow through the hospital slowed down leading to what the trust acknowledges as poor emergency department performance and, at times, poor patient experience.

The board heard that the pressures could impact on the trust’s finances  despite receiving £10,583 million of non recurrent support against its underlying deficit.

Finance director Howard Oddy told the board that the trust was still on course to break even by the end of the financial year with the eventual receipt of £12.7 million in financial support accounted for.

Elective surgery has reduced because of the pressures, with all such surgery other than cancers cancelled.