HOSPITALS across the region have cancelled non-emergency operations and called in extra staff to deal with the crisis engulfing A&E departments.

As early as New Year’s Eve an internal bulletin headlined “Urgent Site Pressures” was sent to senior medical staff at the hard-pressed County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust.

Staff were informed that owing to the pressure on beds caused by an unprecedented number of patients coming through A&E surgical activity in the first two weeks of January 2015 would be restricted to urgent inpatient and day case surgery.

In a bid to free up more beds for newly admitted patients - including many elderly people with chest problems - consultants were asked to carry out daily ward rounds to review every patient with a view to promoting “safe early discharge.”

Patients already occupying beds requiring investigations “should be discharged if clinically stable and request to come back to hospital for their diagnostics as an out-patient, if deemed clinically appropriate.”

At the South Tees Hospitals Trust, which runs the 1,000-bed James Cook University Hospital and the Friarage Hospital in Northallerton, senior staff took a more cautious approach to cancelling non-emergency surgery until it became clear that something needed to give because of the intense pressure on beds.

Professor Rob Wilson, medical director at South Tees, said: “We are at the stage where we are having to review all planned admissions. It is absolutely essential. We don’t like postponing people’s admissions but unfortunately, emergencies have to come first.”

He said the trust had now reached the stage where – “regrettably” - the trust was postponing “a significant number of patients at the moment”.

Elsewhere, hospital bosses at the York Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs Scarborough Hospital - which declared a “major incident” after being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of patients attending the North Yorkshire hospital’s A&E department, revealed that they are planning to travel to Spain later this year to recruit Spanish nurses.

This was after efforts to fill vacant nursing places had failed. Earlier attempts to fill doctor vacancies at Scarborough Hospital were also unsuccessful.

But Dr John Holmes, consultant in emergency medicine at the University Hospital of North Durham, which has also seen intense pressure on beds, said his hospital has “a full complement” of nurses and was close to being fully staffed on the medical side.

However, Dr Holmes said it had been necessary to bring in extra nurses to cope with the high demand in A&E.