26 September 2008
Urgent and emergency care services are best in North-east England, an investigation by the Healthcare Commission has found.
Its report, Not just a matter of time, published on September 26, shows this was the only region in which every service was ranked as either 'best' or 'better' performing. London fared worst, although performance in inner London was significantly better than in the suburbs.
The commission, which described the report as a 'comprehensive assessment of urgent and emergency care services', said better integration was the way to reduce the wide variations that put 33% of services rated in the 'best' category, 27% 'better', 22% 'fair' and 18% 'least well-performing'.
It called on the government to ensure 'the organisational stability that PCTs and providers need to plan ahead'. It said performance was typically weaker in services that lay outside the main national targets, to which the greatest attention was given.
These deficient areas included out-of-hours general practitioner services, the needs of people with disabilities and long-term conditions, and the length of time that patients had to wait for attention once they reached an accident and emergency or
'walk-in' centre.
The proportion of patients seen by medical staff within an hour at A&E departments varied between 40% and 100%.
Similar variations emerged in ambulance services, where performance was good for life-threatening emergencies but less so for other calls.
The report points to a lack of co-ordination between services, with only 20% of A&E departments able to receive electronic data from ambulances and only 30% of urgent care centres saying that all local doctors could receive electronic information from them.
Primary care trusts should plan to deliver integrated emergency care and should not regard this imperative as 'yet another challenge', the report says.
PFsep2008
