A NERVE centre has been set up to give a daily picture of how emergency services are coping with demand during Christmas.

Months of planning have gone into the emergency services' preparations for the festive period.

And for the third consecutive year the Greater Manchester Communications Centre (GMCC) will allow managers to keep a close eye on health situations as they develop.

They will monitor hospitals, doctors and NHS Direct to check on crisis levels over what is traditionally the busiest time of the year.

The centre will be based at the GMAS Paramedic Emergency Service control room at Belle Vue.

The GMCC will monitor hospital bed usage across Greater Manchester as well as intensive care and high dependency beds, 999 calls, GP out-of-hours and NHS Direct calls across the area.

The information will go out to all health managers via a password-protected website which is updated every 10 minutes, providing the most accurate picture possible.

The role of the centre is to identify pressure points and potential problems, and provide a mechanism to bring together individuals from all Health Authorities and hospital trusts speedily to pre-empt problems.

GMAS Director of Human Resources, John Williams, who is responsible for setting up and managing the centre, said: "The centre has played a pivotal role in winter health care delivery for the past two years and totally exceeded our expectations.

"Monitoring the situation allows us to spot problems as they are occurring, enabling more speedy decisions during the times when health services are under the most pressure.

"Our aim is to use the technology to provide information to help Greater Manchester make the best use of resources this winter."

GMAS says all hospitals are "coping extremely well" as from December 20 with a "slightly higher" than average demand on the 999 service with 878 calls compared to 745 last year.