The College of Emergency Medecine speaks out.

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!

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          STOP PRESS!

These are the good guys, my comments to follow tomorrow;

 

The College of Emergency Medicine

www.collemergencymed.ac.uk

PRESS STATEMENT Thursday 09 May 2013

Re: The challenges facing Emergency Departments

The College of Emergency Medicine welcomes the statement by the Care Quality Commission chairman David Prior about the challenges facing Emergency Departments. We have been saying for some time that action needs to be taken to address our concerns about the rising demands on Emergency Departments.

The challenges faced are caused by a variety of factors and reflect a system wide challenge for emergency and primary care. These include:

·      Rising numbers of patients presenting to Emergency Departments. Reasons for this include particular pressures due to inadequate social care beds, a frail elderly population with multiple co-morbidities and challenges with out of hours services.

·      An ‘access block’ caused by hospital wards which do not have sufficient capacity to allow patients in a timely way to be moved from the Emergency Department into wards. This causes particular difficulties for ambulances who sometimes are queuing at Emergency Departments at a result. Any further closure of hospital beds needs to be considered only when there is sufficient community based care to cover the needs of patients.

·      Our workforce recruitment is at crisis. We have had three successive years of only 50% fill rates for Senior Emergency Medicine trainees. As a consequence Emergency Departments have a significant shortfall in senior trainees and consultants which adversely affects service delivery and patient safety. Retention of doctors in the specialty is also proving difficult due to the pressures on the service.

·      Our experience of NHS111 is that this is increasing demand in some areas but not universally. We expected some teething problems as the new system beds in but a key issue is having sufficient capacity in primary care for NHS111 to access as an alternative to the Emergency Department.

We need Care Commissioning Groups to urgently commission innovative and consistent tested patient centred services. Approximately 22 million patients were seen in Emergency Departments last year and we believe 15-30% of them did not require Emergency Department services. Redirecting patients away from Emergency Departments only work if reliable alternatives are available.

 

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

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