End GP partnership model to help A&E waits, says NHSE lead

The NHS needs to take more “radical” steps to improve emergency care waiting times, including making primary care a salaried service, a senior national clinical lead has said.

Chris Moulton, clinical lead for emergency medicine for NHS England’s Getting It Right First Time programme, said the health service “cannot continue” its current approach to addressing long accident and emergency waits and the harm they cause.

Speaking at NHS Providers’ annual conference this week, Dr Moulton said significant changes in primary and community care were needed while caring needs to become a more “respected profession”.

Dr Moulton said: “Tinkering with the system, improving it in small ways, is good, but it’s not going to solve the problem. To solve the problem of emergency care in the UK, we have got to do some very radical things.

“Primary care has got to change. I think that primary care needs to be salaried like the rest of the NHS.

“Community care needs to change. Community care is OK when it works, which is usually for a limited number of hours in the week. Community care perhaps doesn’t need to be 24/7, but it certainly needs to be more available and cover many more hours in the week.”

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Source: HSJ, 14 November 2024