Poor emergency care ‘accepted as inevitable’ – leading medics and patient groups
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Poor standards of care have been “normalised and accepted as inevitable” in emergency hospital care, a group of experts has warned. Leading medics and patient groups said that the NHS “got the winter it prepared for” as it called for winter preparations for 2025/26 to “begin now”.
It comes as an early draft document of a plan to turn around emergency care in England was leaked. Proposals in the draft document include reducing the number of 111 calls put through to 999; cutting back on ambulance handover delays and a rapid assessment for patients at the “front door” of A&Es, according to the Health Service Journal (HSJ).
HSJ said that the draft plans also include plans to improve patient flow through hospitals, better access to mental health services along with more care being delivered closer to home. It reported that the NHS will identify A&E sites which are “most in need”, around a quarter of the total, which will be helped to deliver improvements.
But health officials have said that the final plan will likely be very different from the early draft. An NHS England spokesperson said: “The plan is not developed and so any speculation on what may be included is wrong.”. It comes as a new position statement was published by by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Royal College of General Practitioners, College of Paramedics, National Association of Primary Care, and Association of Ambulance Chief Executives and the Patients Association.
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