By Mark Smulian | 8 August 2013
Hard-pressed hospital accident and emergency departments will share £500m in a bid by the government to end lengthy waits for treatment.
The money will go to departments assessed by the Department of Health as being under the most pressure.
It will support initiatives to ease these pressures such as appointing hospital specialists to join up health and social care services for elderly people, offering longer hours at walk-in centres, providing inmore intermediate care beds and extensions to pharmacy services.
Resources will also go into reviews by consultants of all ambulance arrivals in A&E so that a senior level decision is taken on care as soon as possible.
The DoH hopes to avert a repeat of queues at A&E departments seen last winter.
It said departments were at present performing at their usual level for the summer, with more than 95% of patients seen within four hours.
Prime Minister David Cameron said: ‘With over a million more people visiting A&E in the past three years, services and staff can find themselves under pressure during the busier winter period.
‘While A&E departments are performing well this summer, I want the NHS to take action now to prepare for the coming winter.
‘The additional funding will go to hospitals where the pressure will be greatest, with a focus on practical measures that relieve pinch points in local services.’
NHS Confederation chief executive Mike Farrar said the extra money would be ‘useful in the short term’, but warned: ‘We need the system working together to tackle the challenges we are facing if we are to get a longer-term solution’.
He added: ‘This money must be used to help divert work away from hospitals as well as to compensate trusts fairly for the extra work they are undertaking.
‘This means that commissioners and providers – including community and primary care services – need to work together to get the best value possible out of this additional money, not just transfer financial risk between each other.’
Farrar said hospitals should receive extra funding for winter pressures earlier in the year, ‘so they can plan and respond effectively, rather than catching up with themselves once the floodgates have opened’.
