New measures for Wales emergency departments

Welsh Health Minister Vaughan Gething has announced a new set of experimental measures for emergency departments.

Developed alongside front line clinicians, the three new measures will provide much greater context about the timeliness and quality of care in emergency departments. The measures will better record what happens to patients when accessing emergency care than existing targets, and should help to drive improvement in patient care.

They will be published monthly, on a national basis initially. The first set of three new measures are:

• Time to Triage. The average (median) time people wait for triage by a clinician following arrival, and performance by ‘triage category’ which include ‘immediate’; ‘very urgent’; and ‘urgent’.
• Time to Clinician. The average (median) time a patient waits for a more thorough assessment by a clinician.
• Outcome. Information on where people go once they have been triaged, assessed and treated in the Emergency Department. This will improve understanding of how services are being used to help health boards better manage patients in the community or in different parts of the hospital.

Gething said: “These new measures, developed alongside clinicians, will give us all a much better picture of the care provided by staff in emergency departments than the basic four and twelve-hour targets alone. In turn this will help health boards focus resources in the right places, at the right time to improve experience and outcomes.”