Changes have been made following a hard-hitting documentary on the state of the county’s emergency departments, health bosses say.

Representatives from Shropshire and Telford Hospital NHS Trust(SaTH) re-iterated apologies for failings highlighted in Channel 4’s Dispatches programme aired in June – but said the programme had not revealed anything they did not already know.

The trust issued an apology immediately following the documentary, which showed footage of patients being treated in corridors in overcrowded emergency departments, with others facing long waits in a treatment and waiting area known as ‘Fit to Sit’.

Dr John Jones, Medical Director at SaTH, told a joint health scrutiny committee at Shirehall yesterday (August 7) that he “completely understood” how alarming the programme was for patients and residents in the county.

“We don’t consider the things seen on that acceptable either, I just wanted to make that really clear at the beginning,” he said.

“We know we have overcrowded departments, and we know we have used corridors, and we know that in order to lower the risk of patients waiting in ambulances we have used areas that were not set up for caring for patients.

“What that does is creates risk – you’re working in an environment that the building wasn’t set up for and you’re having to design a staffing model that wasn’t set up for that.

“Some of what you see when you film in the department the way the programme did is [what happens] when that risk is realised.

“We can’t say to you ‘we’re no longer going to ever put people in corridors’, we can’t do that, because we know that if we said that to you we’d be pushing risk elsewhere and we’d be talking about the consequences of those risks being played out elsewhere.

“We are continuing to look for these risks and what’s happening as a consequence and we keep putting things to try and intervene before some of the things that you saw in that programme.”

Later, SaTH Director of Nursing Hayley Flavell told the committee that protocol improvements were already underway at the organisation’s two main emergency care sites in Shrewsbury and Telford in the aftermath of an earlier CQC inspection.

She said a review of the hospital’s ‘Fit to Sit’ had been carried out to ensure better oversight of patients being treated in those areas.

“Fit to Sit is used in many EDs and for the right reasons, in terms of trying to ensure patients are in the right place,” she said.

“What we saw in the programme is we were having patients in those areas for far too long which is not acceptable.

“Did Dispatches show us anything we didn’t know? No. We know we’ve got long waits in the ED. We know we’ve had patients on the corridor. We’ve got policies wrapped around how we identify where we place patients where we’ve got an overcrowded ED.

“What Dispatches showed us was the challenges that we’ve got and the challenges that we’re trying to address.

“You saw a snippet on Dispatches and the CQC report shows areas where we’re improving but obviously areas where we’ve still got some way to go.”