Commenting today (09 March) on the latest NHS performance data which shows, among other things, 71.5% of patients were seen within four hours in all A&E departments (56.8% of patients were seen within 4 hours in type 1 A&E departments) and 127,000 four-hour delays from decision to admit to admission with 35,000 of these delayed over 12 hours.
Dr Tim Cooksley, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said:
“This is another month of damning performance data which shows NHS urgent and emergency care provision is under significant strain – which is the case in all four home nations – and this is increasingly causing harm to patients.
“Timely, high-quality patient care is often not being delivered due to overcrowding in emergency departments (EDs) and acute medical units (AMUs).
“The number of 12 hours waits or more in England’s emergency departments is gravely concerning. Acute medical care is now routinely delivered by teams in emergency departments rather than in optimal environments and this poses significant risk to patients, particularly older patients who bear the brunt of this deteriorating situation.
“This situation is driven by workforce and capacity constraints and, while the Covid-19 pandemic accentuated and arguably expedited the crisis, the decline has been developing over the last decade. It requires urgent action to ensure it has reached its nadir.
“We need urgent workforce plans, sufficient acute medical capacity, expansion of dedicated same day emergency care services, expansion of community care, increased hospital beds and better digital solutions for communication between primary care and acute medicine teams for both admission and discharge processes.”
*The data also showed number of RTT patients waiting to start treatment was 7.2 million and 486,000 patients were waiting six weeks or more for one of the 15 key diagnostic tests.
SAM has today launched its policy document Acute Medicine: A policy vision for improving urgent and emergency (UEC) care.
*Acute medicine deals with the immediate and early treatment of adult patients with a variety of medical conditions who present to hospital as emergencies.
The specialty receives the majority of patients admitted from A&E and helps maintain the flow of patients through emergency departments to avoid exit block, the term used when patients cannot be moved into a hospital bed.