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Showing results for tags 'Accident and Emergency'.
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News Article
‘Controversial’ A&E policy 'showed we're all shouldering the pain', says CEO
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A high-profile shift to admitting patients from A&E to wards irrespective of bed capacity has ‘turned the dial’ for an acute trust’s emergency care, its chief executive has told HSJ. Since introducing the model in July last year North Bristol Trust has seen a significant improvement in its performance against the national target, with the number of patients seen within four hours rising from 51% to 72% in August 2023 – with a peak of 80% in April 2023. The model attracted interest from NHS England last year, as well as some concern from the Nuffield Trust over patient safety – but NBT CEO Maria Kane said the trust was “happy, on balance” with the system. She said the model “won’t be for everyone and we never claimed it would be” but she added: “Engendering whole hospital conversations about the principles of flow and understanding of [the emergency department] is something we could all do.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 8 November 2023 -
News Article
‘Excess deaths’ due to A&E delays rise by nearly a third in one year
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Long waits in A&E departments may have caused around 30,000 ‘excess deaths’ last year, according to new estimates. Using a methodology backed by experts, HSJ analysis of official data has produced an estimate of 29,145 ‘excess deaths’ related to long accident and emergency delays in 2022-23, up from 22,175 in 2021-22, and 9,783 related deaths in 2020-21. For the first time, the analysis has also produced estimates of excess mortality related to long A&E delays for every acute trust. The data suggests the rate of excess deaths from 2022-23 has so far continued into 2023-24. The analysis followed a methodology used in a peer-reviewed study published in the Emergency Medicine Journal, which found delays to hospital admission for patients of more than five hours from time of arrival at A&E were associated with an increase in all-cause mortality within 30 days. Data scientist Steve Black, one of the authors of the EMJ study, said: “Long waits in A&E should never happen and 12-hour waits should be something like a never event. They should be intolerable anywhere. If we want to fix them it’s helpful to know which trusts have the worst problems with long waits.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 7 November 2023 -
News ArticleNHS bosses are using misleading figures to hide dangerously poor performance by A&E units in England against the four-hour treatment target, emergency department doctors claim. Some A&Es treat and admit, transfer or discharge as few as one in three patients within four hours, although the NHS constitution says they should deal with 95% of arrivals within that timeframe. How well or poorly A&Es are doing in meeting the 95% target is not in the public domain because the data that NHS England publishes is for NHS trusts overall, not individual hospitals. That means official figures are an aggregate of performance at sometimes two A&Es run by the same trust or include data for any walk-in centres, minor injuries units or urgent treatment centres that a trust also operates. Forty-eight trusts have two A&Es and many also run at least one of the latter. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), which represents A&E doctors, wants that system scrapped. It is urging NHS England to start publishing data that shows the true performance of every individual emergency department against the 95% standard. “The current data is misleading,” Dr Adrian Boyle, the college’s president, told the Guardian. “It’s a good example of a lack of transparency and also of performance incentives. Being open about the long delays in some A&Es would shine a light in some dark places.” Read full story Source: The Guardian. 28 October 2023
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News Article
NHS Wales: Thousands of hours missing from A&E figures
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The true picture of A&E waiting times in Wales has been seriously under-reported for a decade, the BBC can reveal. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has established thousands of hours are missed from monthly figures. Senior A&E doctors have been raising the issue for months. The Welsh government said it would ask health boards for assurances they were following the guidance "to ensure the data is absolutely transparent". The RCEM said it could not measure "how bad" things were because thousands of patients subject to so-called "breach exemptions" were not included in the overall A&E waiting times. The Welsh government initially disputed the RCEM's claim, but after seeing detailed figures - which were obtained through freedom of information (FOI) requests to health boards - it changed its position. Wales' health minister has repeatedly claimed A&E waiting times in Wales have "bettered English performance". But once the missing data is taken into account, it suggests the performance in Wales is worse. Read full story Source: BBC News, 16 October 2023 -
News Article
Rise in A&E visits for hiccups and earaches add to strain on NHS
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The NHS in England is facing mounting pressure amid a surge in patients attending A&E departments with minor ailments, health bosses have said. Emergency departments, which are designed for serious injuries and life-threatening emergencies only, are seeing an increase in people attending with sore throats, insomnia, coughs and earache. Data analysed by the Press Association news agency also shows more people going to A&E with complaints such as hiccups, nasal congestion, backache and nausea. Cases where sore throat was the chief complaint rose by 77% between 2021-22 and 2022-23, from 191,900 cases to 340,441. Patients going to A&E with coughs rose by 47%, from 219,388 to 322,500, while attendances for nosebleeds rose by a fifth, from 47,285 cases to 56,546. Miriam Deakin, the director of policy and strategy at NHS Providers, said: “The rise in A&E admissions is piling even more pressure on to an already stretched NHS. Persistent strain on primary care services, including GPs and dentists, means patients often resort to A&E when they cannot access timely care elsewhere. “Minor ailments such as coughs, earache, fever, nausea and hiccups can and should be managed through more appropriate services such as pharmacies and NHS 111 online. This could ease pressure on emergency departments, whose priority is to deliver urgent care for those most in need. Boosting capacity of staff, beds and equipment in these settings would also significantly help. However, this requires proper funding and support from the government.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 10 October 2023 -
News Article
A&E handover delays ‘still getting worse at some hospitals’
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Ambulance chiefs say handover delays have got worse at some trusts in recent months, despite the picture improving nationally since last winter. A report from the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives says there are continuing concerns about handover delays at emergency departments. Jason Killens, the body’s lead chief executive for operations, told HSJ: “There’s been some improvement [at some sites] since February, but what we’ve also seen is a commensurate or bigger decay in other sites across that same period.” Mr Killens said “it’s difficult to be precise” about why some trusts have struggled more than others but that challenged hospitals are often affected by “pathway issues” including delayed discharges. “And then maybe there are challenges around stable leadership or the visibility of the leadership, the culture there about managing that risk dynamically, and so on,” he added. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 14 September 2023 -
News Article
Thousands unaware they have diabetes could be diagnosed at A&E, says study
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Thousands of people unaware they have type 2 diabetes could be diagnosed and avoid serious complications if screening was introduced in emergency departments, a study suggests. The prevalence of the disease has risen dramatically in countries of all income levels in the last three decades, according to the World Health Organization. More than 400 million people have been diagnosed, but millions more are estimated to be in the dark about the fact they have the condition. A study that took place in an NHS trust in England suggests 10% more cases could be picked up with the use of a simple blood test. Screening could also pick up 30% more cases of pre-diabetes – a serious condition where blood sugar levels are higher than normal. The findings are being presented at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Hamburg, Germany. “Early diagnosis is the best way to avoid the devastating complications of type 2 diabetes, and offers the best chance of living a long and healthy life,” said Prof Edward Jude, of Tameside and Glossop integrated care NHS foundation trust. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 3 October 2023 -
Content ArticleOvercrowding in the emergency department (ED) is a global problem that causes patient harm and exhaustion for healthcare teams. Despite multiple strategies proposed to overcome overcrowding, the accumulation of patients lying in bed awaiting treatment or hospitalisation is often inevitable and a major obstacle to quality of care. This study in BMJ Open Quality looked at a quality improvement project that aimed to ensure that no patients were lying in bed awaiting care or referral outside a care area. Several plan–do–study–act (PDSA) cycles were tested and implemented to achieve and maintain the goal of having zero patients waiting for care outside the ED care area. The project team introduced and adapted five rules during these cycles: No patients lying down outside of a care unit Forward movement Examination room always available Team huddle An organisation overcrowding plan The researchers found that the PDSA strategy based on these five measures removed in-house obstacles to the internal flow of patients and helped avoid them being outside the care area. These measures are easily replicable by other management teams.
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Content ArticleThe Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE) has published a new report charting the major increase in the frequency and length of hospital handover delays over the past ten years, calling for an even greater focus on improvements that will reduce and eradicate delays, prevent more patients from coming to significant harm and stop the drain on vital ambulance resources.
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News Article
ChatGPT could help reduce A&E wait times
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
ChatGPT could be used to diagnose patients in a bid to reduce waiting times in emergency departments, researchers have suggested. It comes after a study found the language model, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), “performed well” in generating a list of diagnoses for patients and suggesting the most likely option. Researchers in the Netherlands entered the records of 30 patients who visited an emergency department in 2022, as well as anonymous doctors’ notes, into ChatGPT versions 3.5 and 4.0. The AI analysis was compared to two clinicians who made a diagnosis based on the same information, both with and without laboratory data. When lab data was included, doctors had the correct answer in their top five differential diagnoses in 87% of cases, compared with 97% for ChatGPT 3.5 and 87% for ChatGPT 4.0. There was a 60% overlap between the differential diagnoses by clinicians and ChatGPT. The team said that while ChatGPT was “able to suggest medical diagnoses much like a human doctor would”, more work is needed before it is applied in the real world. Read full story Source: The Independent, 13 September 2023 -
Content ArticleDelays in the handover of patient care from ambulance crews to emergency departments (EDs) are causing harm to patients. A patient’s health may deteriorate while they are waiting to be seen by ED staff, or they may be harmed because they are not able to access timely and appropriate treatment. This national investigation sought to examine the systems that are in place to manage the flow of patients through and out of hospitals and consider the interactions between the health and social care systems (the ‘whole system’). This report brings together the findings from the investigation’s three interim reports and provides an update since they were published. You can view the interim reports on the hub: Interim report 1 (16 June 2022) Interim report 2 (3 November 2022) Interim report 3 (27 February 2023)
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News Article
NHS whistleblowers warn of 'unsafe' A&E staff shortages
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A group of senior doctors has accused NHS Grampian of ignoring their safety concerns about emergency departments. They told BBC Scotland News they were speaking out because they feel they cannot deliver a safe level of care. The medics said staff shortages meant Grampian's two A&Es have no senior registrars on shift to make key decisions about patients for the majority of weekend night shifts. Documents seen by the BBC News show medics have been raising concerns since 2021, both with NHS Grampian and the Scottish government, and in July this year submitted a formal whistleblowing complaint about the situation. One doctor said: "The staff are in an impossible situation. "We are witnessing ongoing harm with unacceptable delays to the assessment and treatment of patients. "There have been avoidable deaths and at other times there are too long delays getting to patients who may be suffering from a serious condition like stroke or sepsis." Read full story Source: BBC News, 23 August 2023 -
News Article
Loss of 25,000 NHS beds caused ‘serious patient safety crisis’, finds report
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The NHS has lost almost 25,000 beds across the UK in the last decade, according to a damning report says the fall has led to a sharp rise in waiting times for A&E, ambulances and operations. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said the huge loss of beds since 2010-11 was causing “real patient harm” and a “serious patient safety crisis”. At least 13,000 more beds are urgently needed, it added, in order to tackle “unsafe” bed occupancy levels and “grim” waiting times for emergency care and handover delays outside hospitals. Patients are increasingly “distressed” by long waiting times, the college said, as are NHS staff who face mounting levels of burnout, exhaustion and moral injury. The UK has the second lowest number of beds per 1,000 people in Europe at 2.42 and has lost the third largest number of beds per 1,000 population between 2000 and 2021 (40.7%), the report said. There are currently 162,000 beds in the NHS across the UK, according to the college. “The situation is dire and demands meaningful action,” said Dr Adrian Boyle, the college’s vice-president. “Since 2010-11 the NHS has lost 25,000 beds across the UK, as a result bed occupancy has risen, ambulance response times have risen, A&E waiting times have increased, cancelled elective care operations have increased. “These numbers are grim,” Boyle added. “They should shock all health and political leaders. These numbers translate to real patient harm and a serious patient safety crisis. The health service is not functioning as it should and the UK government must take the steps to prevent further deterioration in performance and drive meaningful improvement, especially ahead of next winter.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 31 May 2022 -
News Article
Attacks in Wales on workers up to almost 3,000
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
"I shouldn't have to work out my escape route when I walk into a property." Paramedic Joanna Paskell was a victim of one of the near-3,000 attacks on emergency workers in Wales last year. The patient who punched her got a 12-month community order, but it left the 45-year-old suffering with anxiety and meant she was off work for four months. "It took four security guards to calm her down so she could be treated," said Mrs Paskell, who has worked with the ambulance service for more than 25 years. She said at first she tried to laugh it off, but it was only when getting ready for her next shift, five days later, that she felt the emotional toll. "All I want to do is make a difference - that's why I joined this job. We can't do that if we're working in fear of our own safety." Last year there were 2,838 assaults against police officers, firefighters, ambulance staff, NHS workers and prison staff - a 4.9% rise. Read full story Source: BBC News, 30 May 2022 -
News Article
One in five patients leave some A&E departments in England without treatment
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
More than one in five patients at some hospitals are leaving accident and emergency departments before completing treatment, and in some cases before being seen for assessment at all, with the rate across England trebling since before the pandemic. Experts told the Observer that the increase was probably driven by a combination of long A&E waiting times and by difficulties accessing NHS facilities such as GPs, community health services and NHS 111. The figures apply to patients who left A&E before an initial assessment; after an assessment but before treatment started; or before treatment was completed. They include patients who left to find treatment elsewhere. David Maguire, a senior analyst with the King’s Fund health thinktank, linked the rise to patients having difficulty accessing other parts of the NHS and going to A&E instead. “We’re probably talking about things that won’t require an admission, but it’s important that you get seen by someone,” he said. “So for example, somebody’s got a chest pain, somebody’s got some sort of adverse indication that you would want to seek attention for. It’s a perfectly rational thing to do. But it’s a struggle to access at other points [in the NHS], so you default towards A&E.” He added that staff shortages and social care capacity were also contributing factors. “I think it’s a lot of the NHS not functioning properly. Pre-pandemic, there was a certain amount of flex in the system – even with the problems that we were seeing around performance – that meant you could come to A&E with some of these issues. That flex in the system has gone – the capacity has been absorbed by other issues.” Read full story Source: The Observer, 21 May 2022 -
News Article
Patient waited 24 hours in ambulance for A&E
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Nearly 600 patients waited 10 hours or more in the back of an ambulance to be transferred into emergency departments last month – with one taking 24 hours, HSJ can reveal. The 24-hour wait was the longest handover delay recorded in the past year, and probably ever, according to information released by ambulance trust chief executives. In May last year the longest recorded rate was seven hours. This has risen steadily during the year to hit 24 hours in April. In March a patient in the West Midlands had to wait 23 hours. The figures also show 11,000 patients waited more than three hours for handover last month, with 7,000 of them taking more than four hours and 4,000 over five hours. Some 599 waited more than 10 hours. The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives estimates 35,000 patients were potentially at risk of harm from delayed handovers last month, with just under 4,000 of those risking severe harm. This is based on work it did looking at patients waiting more than 60 minutes in 2021 and was a slight fall on March. They are based only on handover delays and do not include harm from patients left waiting for an ambulance response. Hours lost to ambulance handover delays restrict ambulance trusts’ ability to reach other patients waiting for an ambulance in the community. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 16 May 2022 -
News ArticleNew figures leaked to HSJ show the true volume of 12-hour waiters in emergency departments is more than four times higher than official statistics suggest. Internal NHS England figures for February and March show around one in five admissions through ED waited more than 12 hours from arriving until being admitted to a ward – equating to around 158,000 cases. The official stats published by NHSE record a slightly different, and shorter, time period, from ‘decision to admit’ to admission. There were around 39,000 of these cases in the same two months, which equates to 4 per cent of admissions through ED, and 5.4 per cent of total emergency admissions. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has long called for the official stats to reflect the total time spent from arrival in ED (as per the internal data), and for trusts to be measured and regulated on this. Senior medics have for some time been warning about the patient safety risks of long waiting in EDs and have appealed to NHS England and the government for plans to tackle the crisis. Adrian Boyle, vice president of RCEM, said: “This data show the scale of long waiting times in emergency departments and the scale of the patient safety crisis. Performance continues to deteriorate across multiple metrics meaning we are documenting a failing urgent and emergency care system without any system transformation or improvement." Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 13 May 2022
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News Article
Waiting list jumps as A&E chaos persists
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The NHS has recorded its largest monthly increase in the waiting list for 10 months, as unprecedented challenges in urgent and emergency care continue to disrupt recovery. The elective figures published today for March presented mixed results, but much of the good news – a drop in the number of two-year waiters – had already been announced by NHS England in unvalidated figures for April. Meanwhile, the system recorded its largest monthly rise in the overall list for 10 months, with the number of patients growing by 174,847 to hit a new record 6.36 million. This is the biggest month-on-month increase since the number jumped between April and May 2021 when it rose by 181,708 to hit 5.3 million. The overall list has risen every month since May 2021, but the rises in the last four months have all been under 80,000. The NHS warned in February it expects the waiting list to continue rising until March 2024, with patients now seeking care after various covid lockdowns. Meanwhile, the number of patients waiting 12 hours from a decision to admit in accident and emergency departments reached a new high in data published today, covering April. Ambulance response times also improved slightly last month from March’s all-time low. Average category one performance – for immediately life-threatening conditions, such as cardiac or respiratory arrest - was 9:02 minutes against a seven-minute target, but still an improvement on last month’s 9:35 minutes. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 12 May 2022 -
News Article
Crowded A&Es mean Scottish paramedics play the waiting game
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Paramedic Moira Shaw is eyeing the frantic activity at the front doors of Edinburgh's emergency department. She is waiting for the go-ahead to hand over her patients to medics and answer the next 999 call. It can be a long wait. Last week, 1 in 10 ambulances across Scotland took more than 80 minutes to drop patients at an emergency department. BBC Scotland joined Moira and colleague Blair Paul at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh where they were among seven ambulances waiting to drop off patients. "At the moment we can be an hour waiting, we sit in the ambulance and we wait until there is a space to go in," explains Moira, who has been with the service for nearly a decade. "This is pretty much an everyday occurrence now. "It's that domino effect, so if patients are waiting to move to other areas, A&E gets clogged up and they can't take any more patients in because they are waiting to move people on." Moira said she has noticed they are attending more calls where people have not been able to get through to their GP so phone 999 instead. Another theme picked up by Moira and her colleague Blair is helping younger sicker patients who need urgent hospital treatment. "I've seen actually quite a lot of people maybe in their 40 or 50s who have got now stage four cancer and they've just not been able to get access to any treatments or anything just due to the pressures on the NHS at the moment," explained Blair. Read full story Source: BBC News, 11 May 2022 -
News ArticleAn NHS boss who had a stroke was taken to A&E by her husband rather than calling for an ambulance because of concerns over long waits. In a series of tweets, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust chief executive Deborah Lee praised his swift actions. She said he had "bundled her into his car", last week, after she had showed the signs of a stroke because he had heard her "lamenting ambulance delays". She is recovering but says it may have been different if they had called 999. Waits for an ambulance in England are the longest since new targets were introduced, in 2017. And Ms Lee's regional service - the South West - has the longest waits in the country, with category-two calls, which include strokes, taking nearly two hours, on average, to reach patients in March. The target is 18 minutes. In the tweets, Ms Lee said: "Naturally, I am eternally grateful to my husband for his swift actions… but I can't get one thing out of my head. "What if my husband hadn't been there and my daughter had called for an ambulance and I'd been put in the cat[egory]-two stack?" She went on to say it was not the fault of the ambulance service and the whole system was "working unrelentingly to this but to no great avail". Ms Lee said hospitals were struggling to discharge patients, because of a lack of social care, and so delays were building up in the rest of the system. Read full story Source: BBC News, 28 April 2022
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News Article
A&E patients waiting more than two days for a bed, warns leaked letter
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A clinical director and several senior managers have written to a trust CEO warning that patients are routinely waiting more than 60 hours to be admitted to a ward from accident and emergency, leaving staff “crying with frustration and anger”. In a letter to executives at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust, seen by HSJ, the managers say they lack support from the rest of the trust, and claim the emergency department at Royal Preston Hospital has a “never-ending elasticity in the eyes of others”. The letter, dated 30 March, is signed by clinical director Graham Ellis, two unit managers, the specialty business manager, and the matron. It says: “Whilst we have documented our concerns previously the current situation is worse than it has ever been…Our situation is increasingly precarious… “For the past few months we have on a regular basis had more than 50 patients waiting for a bed and that wait being in excess of 60 hours. “This means that at most times there is limited or no space to accommodate newly acutely ill patients causing ambulance handover delays of over four hours and delay in treatment.” Clinicians at Preston have been raising safety concerns about the ED for several years, but the letter is the first time concerns of senior managers have been made public. The letter references research which suggests patients die as a “direct result from long waits in ED”, and says there has been an increase in clinical incidents, pressure sores, detrimental outcomes, and occasions where patients “die without the dignity of privacy”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 4 April 2022 -
News Article
NHS faces an Easter 'as bad as any winter'
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
NHS leaders are warning that the health service is facing the "brutal reality" of an Easter as bad as most winters. Latest data shows record waits for planned surgery and in A&E, as staff plough through a backlog fuelled by Covid. The government says there is hope on the horizon. Jean Shepherd, 87, had a stroke in April last year, leaving her severely disabled and requiring round-the-clock care. At the end of February there was an outbreak of sickness at her nursing home and she needed hospital treatment. She had to wait in a wheelchair for more than 9 hours until an ambulance arrived to take her to A&E. She then spent 31 hours on a trolley between the emergency department and a secondary-care unit. "She was very distressed because she doesn't like hospitals at the best of time," says her son, Andy Shepherd. "Since the stroke, because of her cognitive ability, she doesn't understand what's happening around her." Mrs Shepherd was eventually moved to a bed in a main hospital ward, where her family says she later contracted Covid, before recovering and being discharged back to her care home two weeks later. "I appreciate that A&E departments have always been busy, but I just wasn't prepared for what greeted me at the hospital," says her son. "There were patients on ambulance trolleys literally everywhere and the staff were absolutely rushed off their feet. I remember thinking at the time that this is not sustainable." Read full story Source: BBC News, 14 April 2022 -
News Article
‘I feel so let down’: long waits for ambulances in south-west England
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
More than four hours after an ambulance was called, Richard Carpenter, 71, who had had a suspected heart attack, began to despair. “Where are they?” he asked his wife, Jeanette. “I’m going to die.” She tried to reassure her husband that the crew must surely be close. Perhaps they were struggling to find their rural Wiltshire home in the dark. “But I could see I was losing him,” she said. She gave her husband CPR and urged him: “Don’t leave me.” But by the time the paramedics arrived another hour or so later, it was too late. Jeanette Carpenter, 70, a stoical and reasonable person, accepts it might have been impossible to save her husband. “But I think he would have had more of a chance if they had got here sooner,” she said. It is the sort of sad story that is becoming all too common. Across England, but in particular in the south-west, ambulances are too often not getting to patients in a timely manner. Before Covid, said one ambulance worker – who asked not to be named – he would do between six and 10 jobs in a shift. Now if the first person he is called to needs to go to hospital, he expects this will be his one job for the whole shift. “At some hospitals we are waiting outside hospitals for 10, 11 or 12 hours,” he said. “There’s nothing more demoralising than hearing a general broadcast going out for a cardiac arrest or road accident and there’s no resources to send. It’s terrible to think someone’s loved one needs help and we can’t do anything because we’re stuck at a hospital.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 10 April 2022 -
News Article
Trusts to stop routine Covid tests for new patients amid ‘brutal’ NHS pressures
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Overstretched hospitals are stopping routine Covid tests for new patients as “brutal” pressures mount on doctors and nurses, The Independent understands. On Monday there were 1,702 new Covid admissions to hospitals in England as of 9 April – with 16,442 positive patients occupying beds – the NHS leaders warn their ability to tackle the backlog in planned care is at risk. Despite pleas from NHS chiefs to measures such as mask-wearing back into force, ministers said there were no plans to change guidance. The Independent understands at least two major hospitals, in Newcastle and York, have dropped testing of all patients without symptoms in order to alleviate pressure on beds – raising fears that Covid could spread on unchecked wards. Other hospitals are also likely to do the same as bed pressures worsen. Sources have told The Independent some trusts have begun to drop “red” Covid only wards, while some are considering not separating patients in A&E. One expert, critical care doctor Tom Lawton, who analyses hospital-acquired infection data, said that stopping patient testing in hospitals was “worrying” and that the NHS would be putting “blinkers on” just as in-hospital infections were “as high as they’ve ever been”. Read full story Source: The Independent, 11 April 2022 -
News Article
NI Health: Quarter of cancer patients diagnosed in A&E
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
More than a quarter of cancers in Northern Ireland are being diagnosed in hospital emergency departments, according to Cancer Research UK. The study, published in The Lancet Oncology, was supported by NI Cancer Registry at Queen's University Belfast. It looked at 857,068 cases diagnosed between 2012 and 2017 in six countries including Australia, Denmark and the UK. Clare Crossey, 35, from Lurgan was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia in February 2018 after being admitted to hospital as an emergency. The 35-year-old mother-of-two, who is a domiciliary care assistant, suddenly became very unwell with symptoms including tiredness and bruising. She told BBC News NI she had contacted her local health centre, where a GP told her she was being overly anxious. Ms Crossey said she had panicked, fearing she may have leukaemia after looking up her symptoms on the internet. "I had a feeling that things weren't right," she said. "The doctor did not agree with my suspicions as they passed me the number of the Samaritans helpline, a prescription for beta blockers and told me to wait a week for blood tests." She said: "I went to Craigavon's A&E, they did blood tests and within hours a consultant broke the news to me that I might have leukaemia." The medical team told her that had she waited any longer to come to the emergency department, she could have died, said Ms Crossley. Barbara Roulston, from Cancer Research UK, said the study confirmed too many people were only being diagnosed with cancer once their health had deteriorated to a point when they needed to go to their emergency department. "We need to reduce the number of cancer diagnoses that are happening in this way," she said. "That means renewed focus on early diagnosis and prevention through things like better awareness of symptoms, better uptake of screening programs and the way to do that is to get funding for the cancer strategy which was published recently. "If we don't, the risk is that we will start to see cancer survival going backwards." Read full story Source: BBC News, 7 April 222
