A NEWLY-CREATED board will investigate why too many patients in East Lancashire are still waiting longer than required to be seen at the region’s casualty department.

NHS chiefs have been told East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust has failed to reach a 95 per cent target for those being seen within four hours at the Royal Blackburn’s accident and emergency unit every month for a year.

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But for August the percentage of those staying less than four hours was the worst in 2016, at 77.9 per cent. Seven recorded 12-hour trolley waits in A&E have been reported in July and nine in August, where there is usually just one or two per month.

In a report to East Lancashire Clinical Commissioning Group, chief executive Mark Youlton said the board, which meets for the first time on October 6, will oversee a “governance plan” where partners will be required to commit to “an intensive 90-day plan” to put the A&E system back on track.

Health leaders in Pennine Lancashire have already signed off on a recovery plan which will examine everything from discharges and ambulance handovers to increasing the use of the 111 non-emergency number for clinical advice.

Trust chief executive Kevin McGee will head up the board, to examine issues from a health service wide perspective until improvements can be secured.

Dr Damian Riley, the trust’s medical director, said that the situation often reflected the difficulty in finding mental health beds for patients brought into the casualty department.

“People are being brought in by the police in a state of crisis and by our partners in the ambulance service, with mental health conditions,” he told a trust board meeting.

Gill Simpson, the hospital trust’s operations director, said: “The accident and emergency board will have the sole aim of focusing on the four-hour standard, and the delivery of that standard, and hold our partners accountable across the sector, rather than a tendency to focus on the interests of the trust.”

An ambulance service improvement programme is underway and an external review of mental health services will be undertaken by the Royal Colleges of Emergency Medicine and Psychiatry in November.