26.02.16
A&E performance over winter ‘well below what is acceptable’ – RCEM
A&E performance standards fell below acceptable levels over winter but are ‘better than expected’, a new Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) report says.
The RCEM predicted in November that waiting times would worsen because of winter pressures. The target for the number of A&E patients seen within four hours is 95%, but the results of the data so far, collected by the RCEM every week from 40 British NHS trusts, show that it was at 90.3% at the start of October and has been below 90% since.
The lowest point was 82.1% at the beginning of 2016 and it is currently at 83.5%. Furthermore, the performance of individual hospital sites was mixed, with 20 reporting an improvement but 28 a decline.
The number of delayed transfer of care instances has also spiked, from 2,175 at the start of the period to 2,390 by the middle of February. And the number of cancelled elective operations has risen from 1,100 to 1,800, although it fell to just 600 during Christmas.
The report says: “It is clear that hospitals’ A&E performance, although well below what is acceptable, has none the less been better than might reasonably have been expected given the huge pressures put upon them in terms of case-volume and case-mix.”
Data also shows that acute bed capacity in trusts has risen from 36,950 to 37,800. Monitor’s financial figures for the last quarter show that NHS providers have a £2.3bn deficit and are consistently missing performance targets.
The RCEM said last year that less than 1% of the £700m allocated for winter emergency care ended up directly in A&E departments, a claim described by the NHS as ‘nonsense’.