Following the launch today (15 December) of NHS England’s consultation on access standards for urgent and emergency care across the NHS, Dr Susan Crossland, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said:
“SAM welcomes the attempts these new basket of measures will make in addressing the whole system, however, it is vitally important that we look at all admissions, including those who don’t come via emergency departments but directly to acute medical units and form a large part of the total admissions into urgent care.
“We strongly recommend that the ‘ready to proceed target’ does not just cause overcrowding of AMUs, thus moving the problem downstream.
“We look forward to further discussions and we need NHS England to start collecting meaningful inpatient admissions data in the same way as they do in the ED data set as this would more easily allow the standards to be applied to our AMU patients.”
Read the full report here: Transformation of urgent and emergency care: models of care and measurement