What steps is the Cabinet Secretary taking to ensure that A&E departments take urgent action to assess and treat patients presenting with head injuries?
I expect every person in need of emergency care to be triaged by a clinician at the earliest opportunity to assess their condition and ensure they are treated in order of their clinical priority, supporting equitable outcomes. These expectations are set out in our Quality Statement for Care in Emergency Departments.
To support health boards to better match the right capacity with demand in their emergency departments, the national Six Goals for Urgent and Emergency Care programme is working with the GIRFT (getting it right first time) emergency medicine team.
A national summary emergency department information table ‘SEDIT’ tool which allows benchmarking with more than 190 other emergency departments across the UK has been established, and we expect health boards to use this information to right size their emergency department services to provide quality care.
Each health board has developed an improvement plan for each emergency department based on the priority areas within the quality statement and GIRFT recommendations, and the Six Goals programme is providing active support to enable delivery. This includes targeted work to improve the median time to clinical assessment, for example, through the use of senior decision makers as early as possible in a person’s emergency department journey via rapid assessment and treatment areas.