Blaming the wrong government.

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This is from ‘The Observer’, today, Sunday 19/5/13. Pretty much my analysis, but this story is down to 38 Degrees.com, an interesting internet protest site:

The NHS Direct health advice service referred an extra 120,000 patients to accident and emergency departments in the past year, compared with the final 12 months of the Labour government.

The increase in the number of calls to the 0845 service that were considered to require "urgent or emergency" assistance came as staffing levels dropped significantly. More than 1,200 fewer people worked on NHS Direct in 2012-13 compared with 2009-10, according to figures from the service. The numbers appear to offer an explanation for at least some of the huge increase in people attending A&E departments and a crash in performance there in the last year.

Of the 143 trusts that have large A&E units, only 18 have hit the target of treating 95% of patients within four hours, with the goal being missed by a widening margin in recent months.

Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has claimed that this is due to an extra 4 million people a year attending A&E compared with the numbers under the last government. He has blamed doctors' contracts in 2004 allowing GPs to opt out of offering out-of-hours services for pushing people into hospitals. However, the figures suggest that other factors are at work. The coalition has been running down the NHS Direct service, about 40% of whose staff were nurses, since announcing in summer 2010 that it was to be replaced by a 111 helpline run by private call centres.

However the 111 service, introduced nationally on 1 April, has been beset by major serious problems, with many patients unable to get through for hours or being given poor advice and arriving at A&Es in frustration. The figures revealed today show that, as the NHS Direct service has been winding down, it has been pushing more people to hospitals. The proportion of calls referred to A&E in 2009 was 24% of the 4,864,035 calls, up to 36.5% of 3,585,954 calls in 2012. Suresh Chauhan, of the campaign group 38 Degrees, who obtained the figures, said he feared the 111 helpline, run by staff who lack medical training, was sending more people to A&E than NHS Direct, compounding the problem. "The real cause of this crisis is a policy decision made by this government when it came to power in 2010," he said. "They decided to dismantle the NHS Direct service which triaged out-of-hours calls for medical aid.

"This service, called the 0845 line, had been working for a few years then and had an impressive record of processing the calls by listening to actual problems and giving appropriate guidance." Alan Milburn, who negotiated the GPs' contract changes in 2004, said it was "complete nonsense" to claim that reforms introduced nearly a decade ago to improve GP recruitment were hitting performance levels in emergency wards today. Milburn, an adviser to the coalition on social mobility, said ministers needed to explain why performances in A&E departments had improved in the latter part of the Labour administration, only to worsen since 2010.

"It's complete nonsense and totally spurious to claim a deterioration in accident and emergency performance which only took effect in the last 18 months can somehow be tracked back to a GP contract change from 2005," he said. "Jeremy Hunt is blaming the wrong government. He has to explain how the NHS managed to improve accident and emergency performances despite an increase in the numbers of people attending up until 2010, but has since failed to do so."

 

 Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

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