04/01/2017 Look East (West)

us, you can keep up to date throughout the night with the BBC

In Look East tonight. Full after a festive influx.

Hospitals in our region at crisis point again.

Doctors warn about the dormant illness with no symptoms.

and temperatures dropping overnight, bringing a sharp frost. I will have

all the River details. Winter pressures are pushing our

hospitals to crisis point. Tonight the Lister,

Milton Keynes Hospital, Kettering General and Peterborough

are all on "black alert", meaning they are operating

at full capacity. And Northampton General has more

acute patients tonight than at Stuart Ratcliffe reports

on what is causing the surge and The NHS in this region

is feeling the pressure. We visited three hospitals today,

starting in Northampton, where every year for the last

decade, its A department

has seen an increase We have shades of black

almost now, like most In reality, what does it mean

if a hospital is on black alert? It means we stop a lot of things

that we would normally do and focus all of our attention

on the urgent care situation. We might be stopping

some routine operations But we are really spending

every degree of effort, discretionary effort, particularly,

on sorting this situation out. One particular pressure point this

year has been the number of patients problems which could have been

avoided had the patients sought help from their GP

before infection set in. We had a very large number of people

who required some mechanical support on ventilation,

which is a technique we can use now. But that got to the point

where we had to bring in more ventilators, we had to hire them in.

We did that and it was great. People had to change

what they were doing, in terms of teams supporting and caring

for the very sick people. They did a fabulous job,

but it was a lot of hard work. At Addenbrooke's in Cambridge,

the hospital is not only it is also now trying to cope

with an outbreak of flu. There are ten ward

areas currently closed because of patients

admitted with flu. We are putting restrictions on the

number of visitors to the hospital, in order to reduce

the risk Of people bringing flu into the hospital

and transmitting that to both Over in Peterborough,

the hospital is also struggling. It has gone beyond black alert,

operating at 107% capacity. The more patients you have,

the more difficult it becomes for us all to give the degree of care

and attention that we want for each individual patient.

So, it is certainly not a position any of us

would like to be in. But we and our system

partners are working as hard as we can, to try

and get the number down and to try and increase the flow

through the hospital and, therefore, reducing the pressure

on our emergency department. Our ambulance services

are also under pressure. Both the East of England and South

Central seeing a surge in demand. The largest increase has been

in the East Midlands. Over the Christmas

and New Year period, the number of red calls, that is,

potentially life-threatening calls, doubled and, in the first

six hours of 2017, the ambulance service received

1,153 emergency calls. What ambulance trusts

and hospitals fear now is a sharp drop in temperature,

which would undoubtedly bring Earlier, I spoke to Dr Adrian Boyle,

from the College of Emergency Medicine and a consultant

at A at Addenbrooke's, and asked why winter pressures this

year are so bad. This situation has been

building for a long time. We simply do not have enough beds

and we are seeing real problems within social care,

which means that outr Part of the reason for that is

that we just cannot get people The advice to patients can be

confusing, because you sometimes get told to stay away

from A, but when you phone 101, you are often instructed

to go to A Do patients receive

a clear enough picture? These diversionary strategies, such

as do not go to A, do not work. This is not really about people

who should or should not be going to A,

but is actually about people There is a big

difference between that. WHat about the longer term?

In 12 months' time, we do not want to be back

in this situation again. Is it just a question of resources,

to build more wards? The UK just does not have

enough hospital beds. We actually have the least

number of beds, per head of population, than any country

in Europe, except Sweden. And in Sweden, social

care is much better. We need more hospital beds

and we also need better social care, so that we can use our

expensive hospital beds sensibly. How can that happen?

We keep hearing that the health services are having to make big

efficiences all the time. You cannot really make

us more efficient. We have had all the fat trimmed

and now we are at the stage A 38-year-old man is being held

by police in Cambridgeshire in connection with a fatal collision

which left two men dead. The incident happened

in Yaxley near The men, who have not been

formally identified, The victims are believed

to be in their late Officers searching for the driver

of an abandoned BMW arrested a man It has been revealed that a level

crossing in Bedfordshire where a driver died yesterday

was due to be replaced The man's car was hit by a train

close to Lidlington, near Marston Moretaine,

at around ten o'clock British Transport Police

are investigating. Network Rail say a consultation has

already started to find a suitable The line is due to be upgraded,

as part of plans to improve east-west rail links

between Bedford and Cambridge. A leading supporter of the Leave

campaign in last year's EU referendum has told

Look East he is worried Peter Bone, the MP for

Wellingborough, says members of the establishment are hoping

to delay the process indefinitely. He says he will be pushing

the Prime Minister to proceed We know there are certain people

in Parliament who have made it clear that they don't accept the result

and they want to play the long game. The longer before the exit

from the EU, there's more chance of some event occurring

which would stop it. Doctors in Peterborough

say they are seeing a growing number of patients

with "sleeping tuberculosis". Unlike active TB,

there are no symptoms But health chiefs are keen

to ensure the bug does not develop - or "wake up".

Mousumi Bakshi reports. It is an airborne infection

that affects the lungs. Tuberculosis was a big

killer in this country Fast-forward to the 21st century

and so-called sleeping tuberculosis As long as we pick it up

early, it shouldn't cause At this clinic in Peterborough,

patients deemed to be at risk from the latent infection

are being invited in for screening. There is a lot of different groups

coming to Peterborough, so obviously, as their doctors,

we really want to protect them and we also want to protect our

other patients, as well. So, I think, finding a disease

like latent TB early and treating it helps protect both the patients,

but also the rest of The vaccine for TB was phased out

a decade ago, but rising levels of migration from high-risk

countries has seen health bosses in Cambridgeshire introduce a pilot

screening programme. We have got about 12 practices

involved across Peterborough and the pilot has been

running since May. We have had a fantastic

response from our GP teams. They have screened over 250 people

and we have now got 30 people in treatment for the latent form

of the disease that, otherwise, would not have known

that they had it. One of 60 programmes in the country,

it has sent in the highest number Data from the region's clinical

commissioning groups show that between 2013 and 2015, there were,

on average, 26 cases of TB detected in Milton Keynes,

42 across Northamptonshire, 63 in Luton, and 85

in Cambridgeshire - the highest number in this

part of the region. It is estimated that a third

of the world's population is infected with latent

TB and one in ten goes A century ago, TB was a big

problem in this country, but improved housing and sanitation

has seen a stark drop in figures. Scientists in this Cambridge

laboratory have sequenced the TB genome, looking at drug-resistant

bugs, in order to find In the United Kingdom,

the rates of tuberculous have declined over the last few years

and, I think, last year, there were about 6,000 cases,

which was down from about But tuberculosis has never

disappeared from the UK and is unlikely to do

so in the foreseeable future. While latent TB is not contagious,

doctors are urging people who have settled in this country in the past

five years to be tested, in order to help eradicate this

once-widespread illness. A writer from Cambridge has won

a major award for his first novel. Francis Spufford is best-known

for reference books But his latest publication,

Golden Hill, is his And it has won the Costa Book Award

for a debut novel. He told us it had taken him

years to finally pluck up I always thought I had

an appointment with fiction, Cowardice held be back for years

and years and years. It is only now, in my fifties,

that I felt that I would not make a total fool of

myself if I did it. And that is the late

news from Look East. We are back with news updates

during BBC Breakfast tomorrow morning from 6.30am,

but from me and the team here, goodnight and I will leave

you with the weather from Alex. Hello.

A cold night is expected for tonight, with clear skies

expected across much of the region. There have been one of two showers

over northern areas, but they will fade away

and we will be left with really Temperatures down to minus 2-3

Celsius in many places and perhaps We start the day

tomorrow on a cold note. But high pressure is building across

the British Isles through the day. Certainly, a frosty

start for all of us. Possibly, one of two showers first

thing across northern parts, but it is looking essentially

like a dry day, with some long spells

of wintry sunshine. We have still got a northerly

breeze, but a lighter breeze But for some of us, temperatures not

getting much above 3-4 Celsius, despite the sunshine.

So, certainly a cold feel to things. The national weather coming up,

but here is the outlook. Rain pushing in on Friday.

We are expecting wet weather later on Friday.

A milder air mass coming in for the weekend, so looking

milder, with a lot of cloud around. two and turning milder into the

weekend.