Keswick’s Urgent Treatment Centre has been forced to temporarily change its opening times due to staffing issues.
The centre, at the town’s cottage hospital, is closed for three days this week, including the weekend, and is operating on reduced hours for the rest of the time.
The Keswick centre is usually open every day from 8.30am until 6pm.
Monday, today, tomorrow and Friday, it will close at 4.30pm and it was closed yesterday, Tuesday August 19, and will be closed on Saturday and Sunday.
During the closures, the urgent treatment centre at Penrith and A&E departments at Carlisle’s Cumberland Infirmary and the West Cumberland Hospital in Whitehaven are still open as usual. The opening hours for Penrith Urgent Treatment Centre are 8am to 10pm.
The North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust said the temporary changes were due to staff sickness and vacancies.
To open full time seven days a week, Keswick Urgent Treatment Centre needs to have a clinical decision maker – either a GP or advanced clinical practitioner from 8.30am to 4.30pm and a clinical decision maker from 10.30am to 6.30pm.
Penrith has to have a clinical decision maker on site 8am to 4.30pm Monday to Friday and a clinical decision maker there from 9.30am to 10pm seven days a week.
The trust said it had 6.83 whole-time equivalents advanced clinical practitioner across both sites. It said 1.66 were currently vacant and a further one whole time practitioner was expected in October.
With unexpected staff sickness, it said it could not operate safely.
A spokesman said: “We are currently in the process of recruiting to vacant posts, it can often be very challenging to recruit to such posts due to the speciality skills required and the limited workforce pool within Cumbria.”
Over the last three months, there were an average of 140 attendances a week at Keswick’s centre and 350 a week at Penrith.
The trust was unable to provide figures of how many patients have been diverted from Keswick while it is closed as it said there was no way to record the data of the walk-in service.
Imran Devji, chief operating officer at the North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Our priority is always to provide safe, high-quality care for our patients and we are closely monitoring our ability to operate all our urgent treatment centre sites safely and effectively.
“On occasions, this has meant we have needed to temporarily close Keswick Urgent Treatment Centre to make sure we have safe staffing to deliver the expected level of care to our local communities. We acknowledge that this is not the level of service we want to provide for our local communities.
“We appreciate that this may cause some inconvenience, and we are grateful for your patience and understanding while we work hard to restore our full service as quickly as possible. Recruitment is already well underway, and we are making progress in strengthening our team.”
