The Department of Health has today welcomed the Healthcare Commission (HCC) Review of Urgent & Emergency Care services, which reports that the majority (60%) of Primary Care Trusts are performing well.
The Report commends recent achievements in urgent and emergency care including huge improvements in waiting times A&E services and response times for ambulances. NHS Direct was also praised for providing an increasingly popular and important service across the country, exceeding its call handling targets.
The Department of Health will be working with the Healthcare Commission and Primary Care Trusts, as commissioners, to improve performance across all services. This includes spreading good practice and addressing gaps in the system, such as providing more integrated, accessible and convenient services that are well promoted to local communities.
Professor Sir George Alberti, National Director for Emergency Access said:
"Urgent and emergency care offered across most of the NHS to millions of people each year is of a high standard and we welcome the results of this Review by the Healthcare Commission.
"We are not complacent and we recognise the importance of encouraging continuous improvement in local services to ensure the delivery of timely, high quality care to patients. That is why we are working with the Healthcare Commission to host three national events to help Primary Care Trusts use this Review to take stock of where they are and develop their commissioning plans to deliver the expectations set out in the Next Stage Review to improve urgent and emergency cares services to patients."
Ensuring services cater for the needs of all patients is a priority and we encourage services to look at and make use of guidelines from relevant national organisations such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (formerly the Disability Rights Commission), and the British Geriatrics Society and the British Orthopaedic Association. We are already working with Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and others to develop a set of guidelines on what good urgent care services for children looks like which will help commissioners and providers in the future.
In support of this best practice guidance has been issued on urgent care pathways to support the local NHS in creating auditable and clear care pathways for key common conditions for older people with complex needs
The Department continues to help the NHS improve the provision of out of hours care. 45% of GP surgeries now offer extended opening hours so patients can see a doctor at a time convenient to them. The national quality requirements for Out-of-Hours services are making a difference and we are doing more. The Department has supported the Primary Care Foundation to develop a benchmarking tool to help commissioners evaluate the quality, effectiveness and value for money of current out-of-hours providers. This is now available to all PCTs.
The report also recommended piloting a single, national telephone number for urgent care. As announced in Lord Darzi's review of the NHS, we are looking at the benefits of a national number and will outline the next steps for this later in the year.