Can we keep up with the demand for urgent and emergency care?

The research I published linking 20% lower A&E rates with access to GPs, very rapidly at first by phone, is now over two years old. We have more and more case studies, more and more CCGs are interested and playing around with it, but no one has picked it up with any kind of urgency. You complain above about schemes to divert demand which have no evidence behind them. This one does. Just tell me, what more am I supposed to do to get this on the agenda?

100% GP phone triage isn't the way to save ED and Urgent Care resources - anecdotally a lot of practices are now dropping it as it is generally shunting risk to the GP's side via many more patient contacts as well as increasing expectations in healthcare access - which may stoke the fire more in future. Since the time of Erlang, Queue Theory always allows for balking and reneging.

What would I do? Offer a central prize to the Universities/Academics to come up with the most effective mathematical solution to best resource utilisation. Set 3 problem groups 1) ED efficiency etc 2) GP resource allocation etc 3) Overall design of Urgent Care.

Model the entrants solutions into thousands of simulations to select a winner.

I suspect the results could be stellar as well as being very cost effective. But there is no easy solution to this problem.

Angus, we don't say it's easy, we do say it works. To say "anecdotally a lot of practices are dropping it" will not do. We have around 90% success rate, I wish it were 100%, but it is sustainable because it is putting GPs back in control of their time, who they see, when and for how long. GPs invented it for that reason. To make it work in high demand practices requires fine tuning and perseverance, but look at what some of them are achieving, eg The Elms Liverpool, another case study from inner Salford about to go public.

Sure we should work on ED efficiency, and again start with demand, and with better allocation of GP resources, and with overall design. But I wouldn't look to mathematical modelling. I'd look for real world practice, probably already happening somewhere, which is how I found GPs on the phone. The first ones showed up by having low A&E, unconsciously.

You are right to identify this as one of the most important issues facing the NHS. The current shortage of emergency medicine middle-grade doctors will translate into a consultant shortage that will haunt us for decades -- if we continue with the same model.

Attempts to replace high-tech hospital care with low-tech community care have broadly failed because the diseases did not down-grade to suit. A large proportion of the work that now goes to A+E is too simple to need hospital care, but too complex for general practice. A gap in medium-severity care has developed, that is widening with the increase in patients with long-term conditions, with older patients and particularly with older patients with long-term conditions.

The solution is to develop high-tech medium-severity urgent care facilities close to where people live. Similar to what might be meant by "Urgent Care Center" in the USA, but nothing like what we use (misuse) the term for over here.

I will talk about this at the "Improving Urgent and Emergency Care Conference" in London on 26th June 2013. Please see http://bit.ly/16WGp6u You would be welcome to attend.

More can also be done Pre-hospitally with improved training and investment. Paramedics are in an ideal position to reduce patients requiring treatment at A & E and this can be done further with the push for some Paramedics being able to Prescribe drugs.

A decent article as usual from Nigel. It is an age old problem he addresses one which has seen me in a personal capacity work with General Practice for more years than I care to remember on improving access systems and patient outcomes.
A key success is levelled on increasing primary care access, and for me balanced with increasing patient confidence that on the day they feel un well they can speak with their GP.

We have many successes of this through our Doctor First system (over 50 practices we have worked directly with) which is rightly documented in the Digital First initiative as an option for General Practice to reduce unnecessary face-to-face appointments.

We don't look to get this on any ones agenda the key is to make sure you are there to help those that need it. There are many big system changes happening at the moment in the NHS and success will come working with those that 'have left home' on the journey to improvement. Without them leaving home in the first place we will make little progress. Let's focus on those key people making the journey before telling them what the answer is or how many evidenced based papers are out there...trust me and I'm not a doctor!

There is not a good relationship between A&E attendances and Admission Rates. Many trusts have high attendances and lower admission rates. Much depends on the process within the trust, those with senior early assessment and decision making tending to do better. We have some way to go to have effective acute ambulatory systems in many trusts. General practice can contribute significantly with good solid evidence linking good access and continuity of care to lower acute referral rates and better QOF outcomes. The key issue is continuity which can be delivered in practices in many ways. We should learn from the past that one size fits all (do it this way and all will be ok) changes to general practice processes tend to benefit a few but degrade performance and response in many. Each practice needs to have confidence in its own system. The operational links between community services and GPs need to be improved and re-establish a proper local team. In too many places this link has been broken. Much can be done by the Ambulance Service however moving beyond high profile interventions transporting the elderly at risk of admission who have been seen quickly by GPs in substantially less than 4 hours to hospital if they do need assessment would be life changing for many.

Nigel, I'd be interested to know if your study looks at the impact of 111 on urgent and emergency care - in a good or bad way?

Telephone triage by GPs with hot-lines for specialist advice and access to specialist clinics will reduce ED access pressures. This will be similar to having specialists seeing first and getting a management plan done on in-patients who stay for 0-3 days done in an OP clinic setting. This needs co-ordination and co-operation, with community support to prop these patients up at home.

Identification of the populations at risk and tailoring services to their needs should be the way to start. Traditionally we have developed services to respond to defective processes. We need to respond through changes in how we learn, deliver and create cross-bridges to address seamlessness in providing and commissioning. This needs to be done with special emphasis on vulnerable groups - especially frail older people.
Quantifiable solutions through scientific analysis would be a boon. Flow and capacity cannot be addressed reliably without mathematical modeling. It is not very appealing, needs capability and should proceed simultaneously with other tests of change.
We in healthcare have the uncanny ability to look at everything through our eyes only. It is time to do this through the eyes of the people in society and engage in honest discussions to address the wellbeing of the individual, contribute towards population wellbeing and at a price that society is willing to pay.
No single solution will solve a whole systems problem. The issues may be more around a lack of will to move towards integrated working rather than a lack of ideas and potential solutions. Competition needs to be on delivering quality through sharing of knowledge and expertise. We need to stop thinking in silos although it is easier said than done. Many of us are still trying to think our way out of silos rather than acting our way out of it. At the same time, we cannot expect anyone to behave differently unless each one of us does so first. Leadership is crucial – but this needs to be everybody’s problem. No single person, service or institution can get us out of this.

We recently had the pleasure of the company of our daughter staying with us along with her month-old daughter. She’d come home to be looked after whilst her husband was away with work.

One evening it became apparent that some discomfort she had been experiencing was getting in the way of daily life with a baby. Sleep was being lost. It needed to be sorted.

“I think we should go to A&E,” said Mother.

I, as a dutiful senior healthcare professional said; “No, this is definitely not an emergency. I’ll ring NHS111 to see if we can get you looked at in primary care this evening.”

We would have preferred the operative simply to have told us of a drop-in facility – I had been thinking of the GP out-of-hours centre that had been located at our preferred hospital in times past – but we understood that she was required to collect a lot of detail. She then consulted a colleague and asked us to ring a local practice for an appointment. We were told that it was acceptable to attend the practice with which we were registered as a temporary resident.

Dad then looked in the medicine cabinet to extemporise an analgesic regimen for overnight use. The ladies would make the necessary ‘phone calls in the morning whilst I went off to work.

I was bleeped during that early morning clinical meeting.

“We’ve telephoned the surgery. We’ve been told that it is company policy not to see temporary residents. They’ve told us to go to some place in the city centre. We’re coming to A&E as we should have done in the first place.”

I had completely lost the argument at this point.

I agreed that they should come to the emergency department (see, I know the current term); in the meantime I made full use of privileged access and asked colleagues in the hospital to provide their specialist advice. Emergency department services were not used in the end.

If we had not been a family with some knowledge of healthcare and the NHS, albeit clearly not bang up-to-date with means of access to its systems other than those in which I work, what would we have done? We would either have (a) come direct to the ED, (b) phoned 111 and when an immediate solution was not offered come to the ED or (c) phoned the practice as advised, got what was to us an unsatisfactory response and then come to the ED.

Poorer people use the ED as the part of the NHS where they can compete most readily for resources with sophisticates who know which buttons to push. Tell them: “You should only use a hospital service as a last resort” and the response is: “We are using it as a last resort!” if the out-of-hospital service is perceived to be hard to use. Even sophisticated intellectuals like Matthew Parris cannot see the point of going to the GP when an ED with attached X-ray department provides a one-stop shop.

So this problem can only be solved by having out-of-hospital services which have sufficient spare capacity to be flexible, can be accessed very easily and in which the public have confidence. It is beginning to look as if the numbers 111 symbolise a barrier of three vertical bars.

Or would Andy have preferred that we called 999 and got the advice of a paramedic?

Looking at the report to which this blog relates it is unfortunate that there is no reference to the development of Acute Oncology services which every hospital with an Emergency Department is required to have. These exist to minimise the effect of patients with cancer on emergency services by bringing oncological expertise to the management if inpatients or by allowing diversion of patients to designated outpatient facilities.

Getting GPs to do more urgent care will make the problem worse, not better. GP time is finite. The more urgent care they do, the less time they have for chronic disease management. It is good chronic disease management and good management of the frail elderly that will ultimately reduce the demand for urgent care by reducing emergency admissions. There is a wealth of evidence that well-managed long-term care reduces emergency admissions but delivering that care is challenging. The last thing policy makers should do is to reduce the amount of GP time available for it by insisting GPs prioritise seeing 22 year olds with a sore throat for 20 minutes (a real example from my own practice - he demanded an emergency appointment).

Great article Nigel as always,increasing demand and extra capacity are key to the current situation but will not happen in the current NHS Plan.
So what we have left is rationing and at best slowing down access.
Not good if you are a patient.

Changing consultants' patterns of work may be feasible in the short term but Daniel is correct to identify the current shortage of ED middle grades. The most recent competition ratio for ED ST3s was 0.5; that is 50% of middle grade training places were not applied for.

http://www.mmc.nhs.uk/specialty_training_landing_pag/specialty_training_in_sem.aspx

ED has to be made a more attractive career and 24 hour consultant coverage will have to be implemented very carefully if this is to be the case. As Jo pointed out, however, the answer is not GPs doing more urgent care as it will take away from chronic care. It is also worth pointing out that the GP places nationally last year were not filled, and more GPs are working flexibly, so designing a solution centred around GPs doing more urgent care is also likely to be a short term solution.

With the increasing rate of consultations for minor illness, many practices have found employing specially trained nurses does provide some headroom to allow GPs to better concentrate on more complex patients, and potentially reduce admissions. The problem with this is that there are very few training schemes and so practices need to train them themselves, as well as often needing to train practice nurses as there are very few training schemes for them either.

Care is moving more and more into the community but nursing training is still very biased towards specialties and secondary care. If we are to provide a better standard of care from a diminishing pool of doctors we need to look at it from all angles.

This is a highly complex problem and one that won't have a single solution so aiming at one answer will in my view fail. Multi-factorial problems demand multi-factorial solutions in the main.
One thing we have found is that a non-adversary approach with a shared vision is helpful and engaging all stakeholders is necessary. Building the positive relationships with all providers and service users is a fundamental step, often overlooked. Sharing data, being open and transparent and trusting others in the system needs deliberate effort, often doesn’t come naturally and without it as the foundation the rest of this improvement journey looks doubtful.

Michael Crawford highlights an area of enormous importance. Oncology has increasing numbers of acute patients presenting at all hours with only Emergency Departments and Acute Physicians to treat them in many cases.
This issue, where major services have not developed access (or withdrawn access) to acute and unscheduled care for their patients as services have grown is at the heart of the problems in Emergency and Uscheduled care in the NHS.
It is clear to most of us the flood of acute oncology patients like many other groups of ACUTE problems in ED will not be sorted in the community

I welcome the issues raised as well as the subsequent comments above. There are some very hard lessons for us all.
1) Senior clinicians making decisions at the front door
2) Extending hospitals into the community and into their own homes
3) Managing people in A&E rather than elsewhere
4) General awareness campaigns with targetted messages to practices and individuals
4) A new relationship between providers

Do we also need increased understanding between clinicians in primary and secondary care - something seems to have been lost as a result of the traditional lunchtime meeting being discarded in the pursuit of identifying individual learning needs? Perhaps it is time to bring this back?

We also need to have joined up meetings with social care too - not just healthcare talking to each other. It is becoming increasingly apparent that health and social care really do need to work together particularly with an aging population and the rise in incidence of dementia amongst the population at large. Our systems presently do not cater well for this in general.

Finally we really do need to focus on the needs of patients and the public and support them but also learn from them too to see how they are navigating the system and succeeding. You may find this talk by 2 of our patients who have had access to their records for over 7 years interesting entitled "Our Health, Our Lifetime's Work"

http://www.htmc.co.uk/pages/pv.asp?p=htmc0476

Dear Toby The shifts of workload to other colleagues, ED to GP, GP to Practice Nurse requires skills development and career development. Your comments on PracticeNurse development are welcome and we have programmes in place. The challenge is now to support Practices to see themselves as training organisations for whole primary care workforce. Current payment processes do not help. Your involvement and insights will be welcome. Please contact me. Dr Marion Lynch Oxford Deanery

Systems of care are usually set up by reasonable people trying to do their best with the resources available. These systems persist until either superceded, or evolve driven by external pressures. Often the underlying assumptions on which these systems are based were not explicitly recognised at the time of setting them up. This makes it even harder later to work out if they still hold true, and to either rectify or adapt to the current situation.
Unfortunately there is a tendency when faced with a clinical decision in a pressured A&E dept to want it made as quickly as possible and with the best chance of managing the patient without unnecessary admission to a scarce acute bed. This has led to the call for more and more senior clinicians to be involved, and to be present for more hours in the day. From personal experience the cases that I was managing as a surgical house officer in the early 90's were the same ones I ended up having to manage as a senior specialist registrar in the 2000's. By then the effect of reduced hours of experience,and more importantly reduced expectations, had resulted in the inability of the Foundation year and Core Trainee doctors to manage these cases. The situation now is where we routinely have newly appointed surgical specialty registrars unable to perform an appendicectomy unaided. Whilst that is an issue mainly for the general surgical dept - the general lack of knowledge in younger doctors about routine matters general surgical has now spread beyond the hospital and pervades all disciplines. This includes many younger GPs. The situation is not helped by many medical schools reducing anatomical teaching and trying to make surgery a postgraduate subject.
Combine the above lack of experience with heightened patient expectations and a litigious culture, then it is unsurprising that problems once dealt with by primary care and junior doctors are now routinely being referred and admitted to hospital.
Likewise a patient with for instance three medical problems will be sent to see three different specialists- as opposed to the old style general physician who was happy to manage the entire situation- and had the advantage of a holistic approach.
The "demand" for specialist care has increased above and beyond the simple number of patients- let alone the increased life expectancy with multiple comorbidities.
One of the unrecognised assumptions in this current situation may be that doctors are getting the same clinical experience and training as in the past, and are able to perform to the same workload. And that performing a 4 month attachment to A&E or General Surgery equips them with the same experience as in the past.
I do not believe that this is the case based on my experience of trainees over the last five years as a Consultant, and discussion with colleagues across specialities.
The overall situation is of course multifactorial - and I do not for one moment believe that there is one magic bullet which will solve it- however we either have to factor in the very real lack of general surgical experience for doctors over the last 5 years and its implications- or we have to address the training enviroment and program for them.
I expect much of this to be mirrored in similar ways in general medicine and its subspecialities.
Should we now be training the next generation of doctors as generalists?

A really interesting discussion. In primary care it is a mistake to separate long term condition care from unscheduled care - most acute admissions arise form the unscheduled care needs of the population with ltc. We need to optimise our proactive care of the these patients, and we need to respond to their urgent needs. Our urgent care response needs to be sensitive and proportionate to underlying risk stratification. Fit young men with sore throats do not need a GP.
There has been very little attention paid to unacceptable variation in internal care pathways within hospitals, variation in use of diagnostics, medications, complication rates, waste and duplication - which leads to huge variation in length of stay. There is still a pervading culture of a need to "fix everything while they are here", what some colleagues refer to as the "acute medicine factory" and a general lack of awareness around the risks that accumulate around each additional day spent in a hospital bed.
Two additional short to medium term solutions:-
1. Primary care needs to be incentivised to move towards stretch targets for appropriately adjusted acute admission rates.
2. Hospitals need to performance manage individual consultant teams around length of stay.

I started and ran a group of urgent care centre based on the US model such as you describe, for fifteen years in the City of London, and they were highly effective and very popular. Despite having streams of politicians in the early days, and even a sec of state visit once, never managed to interest the NHS, nor been asked for details of how we did it. I am now trying to interest individual trust A&E depts to consider my proposals without any success. Uphill battle.

The first thing many people suggest when the A&E departments are busy and slow is that they are being swamped by demand or other external factors. There has been an orgy of such suggestions in the last few weeks as performance plumbs depths not seen since the early days of the 4hr target.

Most of this commentary is based on plausible stories about why things go wrong. These stories appear to be substantially more powerful that the actual evidence and data which directly contradicts most of them.

For example, Jeremy Hunt and many others have alleged that changes in the GP contract leaving them free to not provide out of hours coverage has led to A&Es being swamped by demand. Nice story, but not remotely consistent with the actual statistics (as John Appleby, almost uniquely among commentators, pointed out here http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2013/04/are-accident-and-emergency-attendances-increasing ). I added some other stats supporting this on the HSJ twitter discussion on thursday may 2 (look for the #HSJEmergency hashtag).

Nigel's report claims early on that the data don't explain the current situation. This reminded me of a controversial piece of analysis done by the Audit Commission a year or two before the A&E target was introduced and refreshed by the Healthcare Commission in 2005. This concluded that none of the obvious factors explained the differences in A&E performance (and they included analysis of staffing levels and other hard-to-get internal stats).

I said the following in a BMJ article (http://www.bmj.com/content/333/7563/358) at the time:

"...there is no relation at all between staffing levels and performance. Nor does any relation exist between changes in staffing and performance. None of the intuitively “obvious” factors that might be thought to influence performance seem to matter much.

... the way a department is organised has more influence on its performance than even major changes in staffing. In other words, management matters. And just increasing resources is a poor way to fix performance problems."

This incited much incredulity despite being an accurate summary of the regulator's work.

We seem to have arrived at the same point again. We are identifying problems and proposing solutions neither of which are consistent with the evidence while ignoring known practices that work (Nigel's report also points this out).

In seeking external causes and eschewing known solutions because they are related to "management" ideas not resources, we make the quality of care worse and hurt patients.

Until patients can gain access to see a doctor within 4 hours, then ED attendances will continue to increase. Worried patients need immediate access, and will go to the place that can provide This is currently only the EDs.As each part of the NHS becomes more inaccessible to the patient, the ED is becoming the only place they can seek advice and treatment in a timely way without appointment , especially out of hours.

"Until patients can gain access to see a doctor within 4 hours, then ED attendances will continue to increase. Worried patients need immediate access."

Access to services must be based on actual clinical need, not perceived need. Very few patients actually need to see a doctor within 4 hours (barring emergencies that we would all agree should be seen in an ED).

The ED 4 hour wait target certainly drives patients into the ED and increases strain on the system but the answer is not to replicate those problems elsewhere. Much of what primary care does is invisible to secondary care consultants (I say this as a former emergency medicine SpR myself), particularly preventative medicine and management of long-term conditions. Diverting GP time from that work to see any patient who is "worried" within 4 hours would be an utter disaster. Primary care would immediately fall over and the demand on EDs would be greater than ever.

ED attendances are rising but so are GP attendances - the average patient now sees a GP/practice nurse 5.8 times per year, up from 3 times less than a decade ago. This is a whole-system problem and the answer is not to shift counter-productive targets from the ED to primary care.

I am very glad to know about importance of urgent care centers and emergency services.

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