Call for A&E overhaul amid rise in patient numbers – report
This report flags up what we have been dealing with for a good time since GPs stopped offering a comprehensive out of hours service. Living in a rural area and having to drive long distances to an A&E is a problem I have experienced personally before. The fact that things are now reaching breaking point must be a cause for considerable concern to all rural dwellers who are either elderly and infirm themselves or connected to someone else who has such challenges. This article tells us: GP surgeries should be set up at hospitals to ease the growing pressure on accident and emergency units, which are struggling to cope with an “unsustainable” increase in patients, a report from the UK’s emergency doctors warns. Family doctors, as well as nurses and specialists in looking after frail elderly people, need to assess and treat as many as 30% of the patients arriving at hospital and keep them away from the casualty departments, according to the College of Emergency Medicine (CEM), which represents the NHS’s 4,000 A&E doctors. The call for extra services to help tackle the crisis in A&E departments coincided with a warning from hospital managers that the whole emergency treatment system might collapse next winter unless urgent changes were made to funding. The Foundation Trust Network says the present funding system penalises A&E departments seeing more patients. The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, told the BBC: “We do need to look at some fundamental issues about whether some of the alternatives to A&E are as good as they need to be if we are going to relieve this pressure.” In a round of media interviews he also pointed to what he called a “dramatic fall” in public confidence in out of hours provision by GPs since Labour introduced new contracts in 2004.