More than half-a-million pounds in funding has been allocated to help ease pressure on the emergency department at Stevenage’s Lister Hospital.

The funding – announced on Friday after a bidding process – is the first £55.98m slice of a £100m deal outlined by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Spring Budget to ease the pressure on emergency rooms at hospitals across the UK.

It is being allocated to 70 NHS hospitals including East and North Herts NHS Trust, which runs the Coreys Mill Lane hospital.

The funding will be used to help the hospital try to meet the government’s 95 per cent standard of admitting, transferring or discharging patients from the emergency department within four hours.

Stevenage MP Stephen McPartland said: “The additional £596,976 funding for the A&E department at Lister will bring direct benefits to local people.

“Locally, the Lister Hospital is performing well against national targets and, although admissions to the hospital were up 13.9 per cent in December 2016 compared to December 2015, the NHS trust still performed five per cent higher on achieving the four-hour A&E targets from the previous year. This money will help improve that even more.”

But the NHS trust remains concerned about the increase in demand for its services and the difficulty of meeting government targets – 141,260 patients attended the Lister’s emergency room in the year 2015 to 2016.

The NHS trust’s annual report for last year states: ‘The NHS trust had a particularly challenging year in 2015/16, again experiencing significant growth in emergency admissions and an unprecedented growth in the volume of ambulance conveyances to the Lister’s emergency department. As a result, the level of demand has been in excess of planned growth.

“Like virtually every hospital group across the country, we have struggled to meet the 95 per cent A&E waiting time standard.”

The investment is part of a 10 point A&E plan being implemented across the NHS this year to get performance to the 95 per cent target during 2018. The aim is to help ease pressure on emergency rooms by introducing measures including expanding use of primary care and co-locating GP practices within A&E departments to ensure patients are treated in the most appropriate settings.