Call made for the return of hospital's A&E

A call has been made for a Lincolnshire hospital's urgent treatment centre (UTC) to be turned back into an A&E department.

The centre opened in 2023 and replaced the A&E at Grantham and District Hospital.

A Freedom of Information (FoI) request revealed that last year almost 6,000 UTC patients were admitted to the hospital or were transferred to another one for treatment.

Caroline Landon, group chief operating officer at Lincolnshire Community and Hospitals NHS Group, said the service was "equipped to assess and treat the vast majority of patients".

The A&E department became a daytime-only service in 2016 due to severe staffing challenges.

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the FoI showed that 46,339 people attended the UTC last year.

Of those, 3,227 people were discharged to a ward at the hospital while 2,532 patients were transferred to another hospital.

South Kesteven District Council member Charmaine Morgan said the figures were more than eight times higher than the number estimated by the NHS before the downgrade.

"In view of the distance that Grantham and District Hospital is from any other accident and emergency unit, and in view of the increasing population of Grantham and planned increase in population, I believe it warrants a review of the decision to downgrade the accident and emergency unit," she said.

"I believe we should have... our accident and emergency unit [back] and also, at the very least, an increased duration of the acute care beds."

Landon said: "The decision to implement a UTC in Grantham was taken by NHS Lincolnshire Integrated Care Board following extensive public consultation in 2021.

"The consultation confirmed that a UTC is the most appropriate service for the area.

"Like many parts of the country, Lincolnshire is seeing increasing numbers of patients attending all of its urgent and emergency care services.

"Despite this, our teams continue to assess and treat most patients within four hours, before either discharging them home or referring and admitting them to the most appropriate service for their clinical needs."

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