DOCTORS across the county were urged not to send patients to Worcestershire Royal Hospital for six hours while staff coped with a "very busy" period.
Wyre Forest GPs were asked not to send patients for assessment on Tuesday unless their condition was urgent and required 999 attention.
Peter Forrester, chief executive of Wyre Forest Primary Care Trust, responsible for local health services, said the cause of the problem was a mystery.
"We can only put it down to winter starting. There was no epidemic of any sort and nothing can be detected by our clinical managers - it was just one of those things.
"Patients were beginning to stack up in Worcester so less serious cases would have faced a very long wait."
He added that hospitals in Hereford, Gloucester and Cheltenham were similarly affected.
A spokesman for Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust said: "The hospital was on 'respite' for six hours on Tuesday.
"This means we requested GPs to use other hospitals rather than send patients to the medical assessment unit at Worcester as it was extremely busy during that period. The hospital did not close at any point and the A and E department remained open as normal."
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