A&E patients with non-urgent ailments may be told to come back later under NHS plans

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’s usual winter crisis.

Eighteen hospitals in England are already using “digital triage assessment” 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.

Jim Mackey, NHS England’s chief executive, on Wednesday urged all hospitals to implement what it calls a “hi-tech concierge service” to prevent A&Es becoming overwhelmed.

Patients would see “really big change ahead from us in the next few months” 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 “a personal obsession of mine”, he said.

A switch to more bookable slots would help “bring more order” to services that were frequently overwhelmed with demand, especially during the winter, he said.

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.

With “digital triage”, 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.

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.

“The new approach is designed to end the uncertainty of not knowing how long you’ll be expected to wait while ensuring ED [emergency department] doctors can focus on those who need urgent treatment most,” it said.

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Source: The Guardian, 10 June 2026