Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
Though winter crises are nothing new to the NHS, this one is proving exceptionally difficult. By any measure, patients are waiting longer in A&E. The number waiting more than 12 hours for a bed once it has been decided they need to be admitted to hospital (so-called trolley waits), was up more than eightfold in December 2019 on December 2018. Performance is declining, and doing so increasingly quickly.
The headline measure of performance in A&E is the percentage of patients who are admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. The target was introduced in 2001, the start of a golden era for the (lack of) waiting in A&E that was to last a decade. Targets of this kind have been criticised for distorting clinical priorities and creating perverse incentives for hospitals to meet the targets at all costs.
But there is a clinical justification for a target that ensures patients in A&E are treated as soon as possible, and this and other targets did contribute to the step change in NHS performance and public satisfaction. Crucially, they did not achieve this in isolation – the decade also saw record-breaking increases in NHS funding and workforce growth that went hand in hand with the targets.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/17/a-and-e-wait-times-nhs-investment-review
The headline measure of performance in A&E is the percentage of patients who are admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. The target was introduced in 2001, the start of a golden era for the (lack of) waiting in A&E that was to last a decade. Targets of this kind have been criticised for distorting clinical priorities and creating perverse incentives for hospitals to meet the targets at all costs.
But there is a clinical justification for a target that ensures patients in A&E are treated as soon as possible, and this and other targets did contribute to the step change in NHS performance and public satisfaction. Crucially, they did not achieve this in isolation – the decade also saw record-breaking increases in NHS funding and workforce growth that went hand in hand with the targets.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/17/a-and-e-wait-times-nhs-investment-review
