NHS bosses insist they have turned a corner over long ambulance queues outside Southend Hospital as they revealed a first-look at plans for a major A&E upgrade.

Southend Hospital’s A&E department will be expanded, with work set to begin this year, thanks to an £8million Government funding boost which came after pressure from south Essex MPs.

Last winter, dozens of ambulances lined up for hours outside A&E, unable to offload patients because of gridlock inside the hospital.

Andrew Pike, chief operating officer at the Mid and South Essex NHS Trust, has revealed the hospital is now dealing with 100 ambulances a day - most of which are able to get back on the road within 28 minutes.

In a meeting on Tuesday, he revealed in a bid to increase capacity quickly during the winter crisis, he used the A&E waiting room to treat patients and moved the waiting room and a new entrance to the adjacent fracture clinic.

He said: “The services the hospital provide are never perfect but I think our emergency care services are in a much better place than was the case last autumn. We expanded capacity in the accident and emergency department. We have increased the establishment of nurses so we can run more cubicles and treatments. The net result is essentially since the end of January our ambulance handover time has improved significantly.

“Over all the trust the average handover time is 28 minutes. We’re striving now to make that 15 minutes and about 40 per cent of our ambulances are now hitting 15-minute handover time.”

Mr Pike revealed the first phase of the onward expansion of the emergency department would begin soon.

He said: “The building design is well under way. I expect we will actually start spades in the ground towards the end of this year.

“That will lead to us having 15 increased spaces above where we stand at the moment through an expanded consultation area, an expanded rapid assessment area and ultimately expanded majors cubicles. The first element of that work is adjacent to A&E is Dowsett ward.

“That will now be closed at the end of this week to allow the builders to move in so we can turn that into a fully-upgraded clinical decision support unit with up to 16 beds which will be operational by November so we will have it ready for winter.”

There will also be a separate dedicated children’s emergency entrance, which had not been the case before. This will enable parents and children to have their own dedicated entry point away from the general emergency department.