Most patients ‘right to go to A&E’

by Keith -

2014-05-18 14.49.12-2Efforts to redirect patients away from busy A&E departments will not work, doctors have said – as a new study shows most need to be seen there.

The College of Emergency Medicine review of more than 3,000 patients found only 15% could have been treated in the community.  Last year NHS England suggested 25% could – and used that to justify a major shake-up of A&E units.   The difference amounts to 1.4m patients, the college said.  The college is not opposed to NHS England’s proposed creation of a two-tier system involving major and minor units.

But it said the expectation that large numbers of visits to A&E could be saved was likely to be wrong, and it was important to take other steps to relieve pressures.  One of these includes locating GPs in or alongside A&E units to filter out the less urgent cases – something which is already happening in a number of hospitals.   Read the full story on the BBC website.

Comments

  1. Interesting post, I saw this on the BBC site earlier, it’s amazing how low the number of community treatments there are.

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