Every winter, the crisis of care deepens. Here we are, in the eye of the storm, with the contradictions glaring out from the abyss. 10+ hour waits at A&E, causing countless unreported harms in delayed treatment. It’s upsetting to think soon, someone is likely to die in the corridor, just as last year (The Guardian, 2017) The infamous Corridor is usually where patients are taken by Ambulance when they are unable or unsafe to walk (e.g. the bedbound, the nursing home resident) or when their condition requires continual assessment & management (e.g. amber-flag sepsis, breathing difficulties on oxygen etc.), but […]
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Tag Archives: Ambulance Services
Demand has grown for the Ambulance Services by 35% since 2010. While the government announce that the budget has seen a 16% increase in budget since 2010 (National Audit Office, 2017), in reality matching inflation counts for 12% of this increase. This demand is not predominantly the ‘living longer effect’: while that of course does play a part, aging is largely a predictable variable and with effective planning could have been corrected for many years ago. The increase in demand comes largely from four areas: undifferentiated urgent care complaints; failed secondary care; mental health problems; and social care problems. All […]
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There is much good sense in Sir Bruce Keogh’s blueprint for urgent and emergency care across England, the latest in a long line. It takes us back about ten years to when the Ambulance Services started to strongly develop into genuine healthcare providers rather than transporters. The move was to imbed ambulance services into the NHS rather than have them semi attached as a kind of paramilitary adjunct scooping up casualties and dropping them off at the nearest A&E. It was about treating patients where they were as much as moving them about. It was about getting an expert to the […]
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‘Twas a dangerous cliff, as they freely confessed, Though to walk near its crest was so pleasant: But over its terrible edge there had slipped A duke and many a peasant; So the people said something would have to be done. But their projects did not at all tally: Some said, “Put a fence around the edge of the cliff” Some, “An ambulance down in the valley.” But the cry for the ambulance carried the day. For it spread to the neighbouring city: A fence may be useful or not, it is true, But each heart became brimful of […]
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The spate of stories about how badly NHS 111 is performing are just another example of how dysfunctional our urgent/emergency care system has become. We know that over the last decade there has been a remorseless rise in emergency admissions, calls to 999, attendances at A&E and use of the other various parts of the system like the Out of Hours service. We only vaguely understand the causes which will be many and varied. But what we do know is the system does not work. We have yet another “Review” under way to report next year and local area teams […]
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