The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has recommended that emergency doctors implement the new drop and go hospitalization scheme, which is already operating in London. This was reported by El Standard.
According to the management of the service, such a system will make it possible to react more quickly to heart attacks and strokes. Now the ambulance does not have to wait for the patient to be hospitalized in the clinic, but can leave for other calls after 45 minutes of waiting, leaving the hospitalized patient alone.
It is argued that it is safer to keep patients in hospital – even if they have not yet been processed – than to risk delays in transferring patients in life-threatening emergencies to treatment centres.
Daniel ElkelesChief executive of London Ambulance Service, said the scheme, which drops patients at hospital 45 minutes after their arrival, allows medical teams to get back on the road to respond to 999 calls (the highest level emergency) and provide life-saving care across the country. the capital.
Before the system was introduced, he said, the London Ambulance Service was “regularly wasting up to 600 hours waiting to deliver patients to hospitals every day”. This compares to approximately 15% of the entire ambulance fleet being idle per day.
At the same time, emergency department physicians consider leaving patients without adequate care during hospitalization “unacceptable.”
President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Adrian Boyle He criticized the “let go and go” scheme. He is not sure that a system that works well in London will work well across the country.
“We fully understand the importance of being able to return ambulances to the front lines as quickly as possible. The problem is that our departments are often so busy and overcrowded that people end up abandoned in the hallways. “We have to think about the risk of the entire system.” – believes Boyle.
He added that it is not enough to simply “push one small part of the process to fix everything.”
“If you add the amount of stress to the emergency department, you create a very high-risk area.” – the doctor is sure.
The publication notes that the hospitalization process lasts about 15 minutes, while ambulance queues in front of hospital emergency departments have become common, for example, in winter, when staff are overloaded and have difficulty finding time and beds for each patient. This led to the fact that in January last year, the time it took for an ambulance to respond to a call for a patient with a heart attack or stroke was approximately 1.5 hours instead of the planned 15 minutes.
The NHS is holding national debates to develop a ten-year plan to reform the health system that will “put patients and staff at the centre”. The plan, expected to be published in spring 2025, also calls for greater use of data and technology, with easier sharing of patient data saving around 140,000 hours of staff time annually. Minister of Health Stephen Kinnock He assured that the budget would provide additional funding for the NHS next year, but insisted on reforming the system, as investing a lot of money without reform is like “turning on the taps without fixing the pipes”.
