SERVICES are back to normal at the Royal Bolton Hospital's accident and emergency service a week after it was forced to declare a "critical incident" status.

But say bosses the department it still very busy.

And health chiefs have repeated their message for people not to use A&E as their "first port of call" for minor ailments.

They said previous messages stating the department was only for "very urgent or serious conditions" still stand.

Critical incident status — meaning the hospital can no longer deliver critical services — was triggered when 360 patients turned up to the department on Easter Monday.

This was 30 more than an average Monday.

This led to non-urgent operations being cancelled and medics being brought in from leave.

Ambulances were also diverted from Bolton to Wigan for about an hour.

The status, declared in the morning, was downgraded to "business continuity incident" status at 7pm that day which meant that normal service was still at risk and that special arrangements were still required until services could return to an "acceptable level".

Heather Edwards, Head of Communications at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, said: "There has been a de-escalation and the department is back to normal, although it is very busy and the key messages still apply."

Last week, The Bolton News revealed that there were 20,000 unused GP appointments in Bolton in the past year.

In January last year a "major incident" was declared when an emergency plan was put into action as medics struggled to cope with the overwhelming number of patients in need of treatment.