The government has released their NHS Urgent and Emergency Care Plan to help to alleviate ‘corridor care’ in A&Es and begin preparing for winter challenges. Launching ahead of the NHS 10-year Plan, the new initiative is backed by £450 million.
The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, stated his hope that the plan will mean one in five people who would have attended A&E are treated elsewhere, cutting overcrowding and improving efficiency.
The funding will help to establish an 40 more same-day emergency care units and urgent treatment centres, which will treat and discharge patients within the day and prevent them from being admitted to hospital. 500 extra ambulances will also be deployed.
The plan will also facilitate more home visits by paramedics and community response teams and the expansion of virtual wards, unlocking greater opportunities for the use of rapid diagnostics. If successful, this will improve outcomes during the busy winter period.
It acknowledges that successful systems have reformed their approach to improving urgent and emergency care by focusing on “maximising the use of primary care and community diagnostics”. In order to support providers and systems to accelerate improvement, there will be a significant increase in the amount of data available to the NHS and the public.
The plan states that chief executives and board members must develop their own regions’ winter plans by the Summer, which will be stress-tested in September. As a minimum, they must demonstrate how they will achieve bespoke criteria, such as increasing the number of patients receiving care in primary, community and mental health settings.
Over the last 15 years, the amount of patients requiring urgent and emergency care each day has almost doubled while ambulance journeys have increased by 61% in that same period.
