NHS England announces new plan to meet emergency care targets
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Version 0 of 1. A drive to make more one-stop shops for urgent and emergency care will be announced on Friday as the NHS in England seeks to remedy its failure to meet its target for dealing with 95% of A&E patients within four hours last winter. NHS England announced eight “vanguard” areas to transform services. Among the measures are the acceleration of the development of GP services in hospitals, mobile treatment centres using ambulance staff, and same-day crisis response teams including GPs and other acute home-visiting professionals. More mental health street triage services will also be rolled out, along with initiatives involving a broader role for community pharmacists. The moves, designed to break down barriers between primary care and hospitals, are among £200m worth of experiments. The NHS hopes these will be as successful as the setting up of regional major trauma units three years ago, which are said to have brought about a 50% increase in the odds of survival for patients and saved hundreds of lives. The new vanguards are in south Devon and Torbay, south Nottinghamshire, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, north-east England, Leicestershire and Rutland, Solihull, west Midlands, the east London area covering Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge and west Yorkshire. Keith Willett, NHS England director of acute care, said: “This proves a modern NHS needs a very different approach and shows, even in times of austerity, we can transform patient care. We cannot delay in now securing that same advantage for the thousands of other patients – such as those suffering a heart attack, stroke, or aneurysm, as well as helping critically-ill children. “Equally important is that these networks support and improve all our local urgent and emergency care services, such as A&E departments, urgent care centres, GPs, NHS 111 and community, social care and ambulance services, so no one is working isolated from expert advice 24 hours a day. Our vanguard sites will spearhead these new ways of working together.” He added: “The solution does not lie in simply providing more and more money to emergency departments. It’s clear that we need to deliver a step change in the way that health services in this country are used and delivered. “All over the country there are pockets of best-practice models yielding enormous benefits; but to ensure our urgent care services are sustainable for the future every region must begin delivering faster, better and safer care.” |