NHSE must pause roll out of new A&E system until it can prove it is ‘working’, warns RCEM president

The NHS should pause the planned roll out of bookable A&E slots until a robust evaluation of the new system has been undertaken, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine president has told HSJ.

The proposals were set out in NHS England’s 2021-22 planning guidance last month.

The guidance say local systems should “promote the use of NHS 111 as a primary route into all urgent care services”. It instructs local systems to “maximise the use of booked time slots in A&E with an expectation that at least 70% of all patients referred to an emergency department by NHS 111 receive a booked time slot to attend”.

Sites only began piloting the model late last year. But by March the new system appeared to be being actively rolled out across the service. Seventy five of England’s 126 acute trusts with a type 1 emergency departments had begun allowing patients to book appointments in A&E by calling 111, according to NHS England data published this month.

But RCEM president Katherine Henderson has told HSJ that NHSE has failed to release any data on the effectiveness of the new approach. She said NHSE must pause its plans while a full evaluation of the pilots is carried out to ensure the model was delivering operational and clinical benefits before it is adopted on a widescale basis.

She said: “We are very keen to see some data and clinical validation so we can robustly assess how the 111 First model is working, because, at the moment, we haven’t really seen enough to say: ‘this is something that we really need to push on with’.

Read full story (paywalled)

Source: HSJ, 26 April 2021