A&E waiting times show improvement

But the under-pressure unit is still failing to meet the Government target of seeing 95 per cent of people within that time.

Provisional figures for March indicate 87.91 per cent of patients were seen in four hours.

That was an improvement on 83.91 per cent in February, when 1,063 patients did not leave the A&E unit within four hours.

While the performance was still below 95 per cent, it was the highest since October.

The hospital has not met the target since October 2015.

The data was revealed in the agenda ahead of Tuesday’s meeting of NHS Wigan Borough Clinical Commissioning Group’s governing body.

It also details steps being taken to improve performance, which included ring-fencing assessment areas and discussing every acute admission through A&E with a consultant.

As previously reported, all elective surgery was cancelled in March in a bid to free up beds and staff. Operations resumed this month.

Greater Manchester Health And Social Care Partnership has challenged A&Es to return to 90 per cent, a figure achieved by no trust in Greater Manchester in February.

The report shows the performance of the ambulance service also improved, but remains below targets.

Crews responded to 69.4 per cent of urgent “red one” calls in eight minutes and 60.5 per cent of “red two” calls. The target is 75 per cent.

They responded to 88.4 per cent of calls within 19 minutes, below the 95 per cent target.

It took more than 30 minutes for ambulance staff to handover patients in 19.76 per cent of cases and more than an hour in 7.1 per cent of cases.