\n<\/p>\n
Patients who turn up at A&E with non-urgent ailments could be told to come back another time under NHS plans to stop hospitals becoming overcrowded and avoid the service\u2019s usual winter crisis.<\/p>\n
Eighteen hospitals in England are already using \u201cdigital triage assessment\u201d to help A&E staff decide which patients need to be seen right away or be dealt with in another way. If patients do need urgent care they are treated at once in the usual way. But if they have more minor ailments and can wait, they are told to come back later that day or the next day, or are referred to a community-based service, such as a GP or pharmacy.<\/p>\n
Jim Mackey, NHS England\u2019s chief executive, on Wednesday urged all hospitals to implement what it calls a \u201chi-tech concierge service\u201d to prevent A&Es becoming overwhelmed.<\/p>\n
Patients would see \u201creally big change ahead from us in the next few months\u201d in how urgent and emergency services were run, Mackey told an audience of health service leaders at the NHS ConfedExpo conference in Manchester. Using many more bookable appointments, so that patients no longer faced long delays to access care, was \u201ca personal obsession of mine\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Jim Mackey, chief executive of NHS England.<\/span> Photograph: PA Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n A switch to more bookable slots would help \u201cbring more order\u201d to services that were frequently overwhelmed with demand, especially during the winter, he said.<\/p>\n The Royal College of Emergency Medicine, which represents A&E doctors, disclosed earlier this week that more than 1,300 patients a month die as a result of overcrowding in A&E units in England.<\/p>\n With \u201cdigital triage\u201d, patients put the details of their illness into online hospital information gathering systems when they arrived at an emergency department. That helped A&E staff to assess their condition and decide the best way to manage them.<\/p>\n East Lancashire teaching hospitals NHS trust had found that the triage tool helped to almost halve average waiting times for A&E patients, from 178 minutes to 94 minutes, NHS England said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe new approach is designed to end the uncertainty of not knowing how long you\u2019ll be expected to wait while ensuring ED [emergency department] doctors can focus on those who need urgent treatment most,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n Mackey urged all NHS trusts to follow the lead of the 18 hospitals using the tool. Patients who did not receive A&E care when they attended could also be given an appointment with a physiotherapist, or mental health services, or at a same-day emergency care unit.<\/p>\n \u201cThe big prize for this coming winter is shifting to introducing many more appointments into urgent care,\u201d he added. A combination of booked appointments and digital triage in A&E could have an \u201cenormous\u201d beneficial impact on patients and staff.<\/p>\n NHS England could not say how many patients at the 18 hospitals using this approach were told to come back at another time. But it said the change had gone down well with patients.<\/p>\n \u201cGenerally having a better sense of when you\u2019ll be seen, and getting booked into the right service more quickly, is positive and, for example, at East Lancashire, trialling the tech has brought waiting times in ED down by nearly half,\u201d a source said.<\/p>\n Rachel Power, the chief executive of the Patients Association, cautioned that \u201cdigital triage assessment\u201d may not suit all patients.<\/p>\n \u201cAs digital triage rolls out more widely, it must work for all patients, not just the digitally confident. Older patients, those with disabilities, and people with limited digital access must never be disadvantaged because they couldn\u2019t use a kiosk or a tablet,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd any patient who is redirected or given a later appointment slot needs explicit, easy-to-understand information about what to do if their condition deteriorates, who to call, where to go, and how quickly to act.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout that safety netting, vulnerable patients risk falling through the cracks. The ambition is right but patients and their experience must be at the centre of how these reforms are designed and delivered, not just the beneficiaries of them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Patients who turn up at A&E with non-urgent ailments could be told to come back another time under NHS plans to stop hospitals becoming overcrowded and avoid the service\u2019s usual winter crisis. Eighteen hospitals in England are already using \u201cdigital triage assessment\u201d to help A&E staff decide which patients need to be seen right away<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[21938,1229,24728,1476,480,2315],"class_list":{"0":"post-50227","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-ailments","9":"tag-nhs","10":"tag-nonurgent","11":"tag-patients","12":"tag-plans","13":"tag-told"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}