Extra hospital beds open in County Durham and Darlington for winter

The County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, which runs some of the region’s health services, said the extra space will benefit patients and staff throughout the busy winter period. 

An additional 28 beds have been commissioned at Bishop Auckland Hospital alongside 13 surge beds at Darlington Memorial Hospital. 

Sue Jacques, chief executive of the trust, said the beds mean staff can anticipate and respond to “volatile changes in demand”. 

Bishop Auckland Hospital (Image: SARAH CALDECOTT)

“We’ve got additional bed capacity,” Ms Jacques told County Durham councillors at a scrutiny meeting. “We’ve opened a new ward at Bishop Auckland Hospital, which opened this month. We can then do other things if there’s a need to.”

Bishop Auckland Hospital lost its acute services in 2009 including its accident and emergency department as part of efficiency measures. A campaign to reopen the A&E department, led by the then local MP Dehenna Davison, was launched in 2019 but was unsuccessful because of the trust’s management of its services. 

But the facility was repurposed last year ahead of the 2023 winter period and will once again provide extra capacity to cope with demand. 

As well as the extra beds, the trust has implemented several other measures recommended by the government, including urgent community response and hospital at home services.

Ms Jacques added: “We’ve put some new services in place in recent years including same day emergency care, and they are critical at turning patients around fairly quickly. They can treat patients with fairly minor ailments that A&E can’t and we’re looking to optimise those.”

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Other priorities include improving ambulance handover times, emergency department waiting times and hospital discharges.

The importance of same day urgent care hubs were also highlighted as key to responding to the winter pressures. Open seven days a week throughout winter, the trust said it is exploring funding additional capacity in the University Hospital North Durham hub for the full month of January. 

It is hoped the improvements will help to reduce the number of hospital admissions and reduce pressure on urgent care centres and A&E departments.

Ms Jacques added: “Demand for services is unpredictable. Sometimes things like flu runs around our communities but we are aware of that and have the ability to respond to it.”