Summary
Putting patients in tents outside hospitals is a completely unacceptable ‘solution’ to the ambulance handover problems and the funding would be far better spent on staff in the community, says Royal College of Emergency Medicine president Katherine Henderson in this HSJ opinion piece.
Content
"Urgent and emergency care is in crisis. While the focus has been on the serious elective backlog, a dangerous situation has been developing in our already pressured emergency care system.
Emergency departments are full and struggling to receive ambulance patients, resulting in delays and patient harm. Hospitals are full and are struggling to get beds for the patients needing admission. Patients are stuck in the back of ambulances, on trolleys in ED corridors and increasingly in hospital beds because of the paucity of community support for discharges.
We now find ourselves in the completely unacceptable situation where the “solution” to ambulance handover problems is to put up tents or sheds in front of emergency departments...
The blindingly obvious problem here, as ever, is staffing. Neither hospitals nor the ambulance service has enough staff to cover another clinical area, let alone a tent.
Not only that, but these tents do not have the usual safety features of a hospital and while covid is still circulating extensively pose a risk of cross infection. They are a danger to patients’ health and dignity."
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