Ministers and officials are working on an urgent emergency care plan
Plans to treat more people at home or in their local area instead of in hospital are expected to form part of a major overhaul of A&E care to be published this spring.
This could be at dedicated local “respiratory hubs”, where medics can prescribe medication for chest infections or asthma, or at home by urgent community response teams, where doctors or community nurses can visit older people who need medical attention that does not require hospital admission. Plans to shift more care from A&E to the community could see a significant expansion of the response teams.
A Department for Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “A&E services have been under immense pressure again this winter as they deal with a broken system. A report by the Royal College of Nursing last week found that nine in 10 nurses believe patient safety is being put at risk due to overcrowding in hospitals, and seven in 10 said they wereSince the new year, several hospitals in the UK have declared a critical incident, meaning demand is outstripping capacity.
In January 2023, during a similarly tough winter, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government and NHS England published a delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care. An NHS spokesperson said: “The NHS delivered on its 2023 urgent and emergency care plan including extra beds, more staff and more care in the community through proven measures like virtual wards – while there have been some improvements in performance, there is much more to do to bring down long waits for patients.
A joint statement last Wednesday from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Royal College of GPs, Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, the Patients Association and others said any shift from hospital to community would need more funding for primary care and a cutting of red tape to free up more time for GPs.
“We would support a model of care that supports people in the community and having more investment in long term solutions that allow people to live and be treated in their own home. “We need to get better at enabling patients to flow into and out of hospital where they need to. A big part of that is going to be tackling delayed discharges, and improving community-based NHS services.”
But Gardner said: “I don’t think it is credible without some form of intervention to improve access to social care support in the short term. Deighton said: “The most pressing issue for the NHS is the issue of social care provision. We know the social care sector continues to operate under immense pressure.
“Those carers and those nursing home placements are in very short supply, they just don’t exist, which means patients are trapped in hospitals, which means that new patients arriving are really struggling to access those beds. So the social care sector absolutely needs looking at.”Experts and union leaders say that any new plan to alleviate pressure on A&Es would need to address chronic staffing shortages in the NHS and care sector.
Patricia Marquis, RCN executive director for England, said: “There is no turning around NHS services and ending corridor care without addressing the crisis in nursing.
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