Patients in Bath sent to hotel as NHS hospitals struggle with overcrowding

  • Watch Caron Bell's report.

Hospital patients in Wiltshire and Bath are being sent to a hotel in the city as the local NHS struggles with overcrowding.

Despite Covid rates falling in the area, NHS bosses have said they are in the midst of a winter crisis, with an extra ward opening at St Martin's Hospital in Odd Down.

Pressure on the NHS is still high, thanks to a backlog of elective surgery, and all the more common winter illnesses.

To protect patient privacy, the hotels aren't being named, but there are currently 20 of them open across England.

Agency carers are being hired to staff them, while nurses from Europe have come over to staff the extra ward at St Martins Hospital.

Inside the new ward at St Martin's Hospital. Credit: ITV News

A lot of the pressure in hospitals is coming from patients - many of them elderly - who aren't well enough to go home.

Karen Baker, Programme Lead for Care Hotels, told ITV News: "It is a crisis. There's really no other way to put it.

"We're looking at this surge capacity because we know we need this extra capacity and so we're looking at other things that might help at this point in time.

"And care hotels have been used successfully in other parts of the country."

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Local NHS managers are saying they're going to need more and more of these types of community facilites to ease that pressure.

Dr Kathryn Hogg has been on the NHS frontline for the two most challenging years in its history, and has come to regard it as the new normal.

She said: "We are constantly busy. And I think it's going to continue that way, I'm afraid to say. There's always going to be the need for these community beds."

Managers might have a bed crisis on their hands, but for some patients on the new St Martin's ward, having the space and time for rehab has made all the difference.

Ward sister Nicola Hartley told ITV News: "We've had a lady who's over 100 years old admitted to Ward 4.

"She'd spent 128 days in hospital and she's now set to go home today. That's really great news not only for her but also for her family - that they're able to have her back in her home home. And that's also where she wishes to go."