STRUGGLING hospital bosses are spending £400,000 per month buying in agency nurses in a bid to cope with soaring numbers of patients and staff sickness, a meeting heard.

The stark problems at Basingstoke’s North Hampshire Hospital, as well as in Andover and Winchester, were laid bare to councillors yesterday as bosses blamed severe winter pressures and bed blocking.

Mary Edwards, chief executive of Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, told the county council’s health and wellbeing board how the agency nursing bills had been “quite a shock to the system” and described her hospitals as “constantly running on full”.

In December, The Gazette reported on how Basingstoke hospital was facing “unprecedented challenges”, with record numbers of people going to the Emergency Department while beds were blocked by those who could not be discharged.

Some planned operations had to be cancelled, and there was an increase in patients waiting on trolleys after arriving by ambulance.

Mrs Edwards told how that situation across the trust had not changed.

She said: “We are really only doing urgent surgical care at the moment, which is not good for Hampshire people.”

Last month an 82-year-old woman was left waiting on a trolley at Winchester’s A&E department for 12 hours after suffering a heart attack, and had her top lifted to be examined as she lay in a corridor.

It was later reported how managers issued an urgent plea for volunteers from non-medical departments, including IT and HR, to help feed the sick on wards.

The meeting heard how an extra £5.2m has been spent on providing more consultants, nurses, hospital beds and ambulances, but all systems are still pushed to the limit.

A further £1.47m has been spent boosting community care through measures such as dozens of extra nursing home beds and more hospital discharge teams.

The report concluded: “The whole health and care system across Hampshire remains under extreme pressure given the numbers of people being admitted to acute hospitals and the increasing complexity of support many people require in order to safely leave hospital.

“The pressures within the whole system, both in terms of volume and complexity of people’s needs, are likely to persist for several more months and will continue to require resources and management attention to continue in their present form.”

Hampshire County Council’s head of adult services, Gill Duncan, said that weekly meetings are currently being held with the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, about winter pressures on NHS trusts.