A sudden influx of emergency cases caused a bottleneck of ambulances waiting to deliver patients to Colchester General Hospital.
At one stage, there were eight ambulances queued up with patients awaiting admission to accident and emergency at the Turner Road hospital.
Health managers at the hospital blamed a sudden surge of emergency cases for the problems encountered yesterday.
A spokesman for Essex Rivers Healthcare Trust said the difficulties were not related to any wider problem at the hospital.
He said: "There was an influx of of emergency cases that came in all at the same time. Each patient has to be properly processed into accident and emergency and then to wherever they need to go.
"The influx created a bit of a bottleneck as the ambulances arrived one after another.
"There's no inherent problem there. They were dealing with the cases there as quickly as possible."
Published Wednesday November 6, 2002
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