HEALTH bosses do not expect to meet two key targets — for urgent care and medical tests — by the end of March.

Accident and Emergency departments must make sure 95 per cent of patients are admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours.

But the most recent figures — for January — show that just under 77 per cent were being seen within that time frame.

To date, February has seen a similar performance.

And bosses say that although efforts are being made to address matters, they say it will be difficult to bring the figures up to an improved 85 per cent before April 1.

Ambulance response times are also failing to meet any of the targets set for different categories of incidents.

The problems were raised at yesterday’s meeting of NHS Bolton’s Clinical Commission Group’s board.

Delivering his report to the board Dr Barry Silvert said: “A&E is bad news unfortunately and I don’t think it’s comes as any surprise that our performance is not so far showing the signs of improving we would like to have seen.We have some quite challenging problems in December and January with influenza and norovirus.”

He added: “In December performance was just under 77 per cent. Given that the target we have to reach by April 1 is 85 per cent, that is looking increasingly challenging.”

But he said that work was underway to tackle the problem of A&E waiting times. He said “We’re going to really try to have a fresh look at how to get more patients quickly discharged from hospital, avoid unnecessary admissions and try to deflect patients to more appropriate places when they don’t really need to be in A&E.

And on the ambulance response time failures he added that the group was working with North West Ambulance Service but added: “ I can’t guarantee we’re going to see an improved performance within a very short time frame.”

And more than one per of people have had to wait longer than six weeks for a diagnostic test after diagnosis.

The majority of breaches occurred at Royal Bolton, Salford Royal and Manchester Foundation Trust hospitals.

More than half of the breaches were for patients awaiting colonoscopies, but those in need of MRI scans were also affected, most of who were waiting for an appointment at Salford Royal Hospital.

Su Long, Chief Officer of Bolton CCG, said: “Not doing well in urgent care and then in diagnostics is not a very good place to be. And whilst there is work going on — and things will pick up and recover — whether this will be by March, in my view, is unlikely.”