NHS winter target ‘barking mad’

Orders to make sure no hospital patients are treated in corridors or made to wait on trolleys for hours when the winter crisis hits have been called ‘barking mad’ by health service chiefs.

NHS England has also instructed hospitals to ensure patients are not waiting more than 15 minutes in the back of an ambulance outside an A&E unit as they wait to be handed to hospital staff.

Critics have described the plans, which are intended to avoid a repeat of last year’s meltdown, as ‘totally unrealistic’ and an attempt ‘to create Narnia’. Hospital bosses say they have to use all the tactics the NHS wants to ban in order to help them cope with the influx of patients attending hospital in winter time.

NHS England’s plans are laid out in a letter sent to all NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups, in which Pauline Philip, national director of urgent and emergency care, sets out actions to ‘consistently ensure that safety os maintained during times of significant pressure’.

But hospital bosses claim their struggle to keep up with the demand for care over winter, while maintaining patient safety, forces them to use the three practices Philip wants to end.

Taj Hassan, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: “We all aspire to avoiding doing any of those things. But trying to flog a dead horse, or to create Narnia, through a new set of executive instructions isn’t going to help us.

“Our urgent and emergency care system is under extreme stress going into winter. Given that hospitals are underbedded and underfunded, and emergency departments are understaffed, trying to deliver performance in that climate is nigh-on impossible. We have to define reality rather than delude ourselves about the scale of this problem of caring safely for patients during winter.”

Another NHS trust chief executive said: “They are barking mad. Patients are waiting on corridors already. This will only get worse as we progress through winter. Twelve-hour trolley breaches in some hospitals are no longer unusual, and for some no longer cause distress or outrage as they are viewed as inevitable. The demands are not realistic.”

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said hospitals would do everything they could to avoid trolley waits or patients being teated on corridors, and minimise patient handover times.

But he also added: “The indications are that flu may cause more problems than we have seen in recent years. And a prolonged cold spell – often linked to falls and respiratory problems – could make matters worse. So we need to be realistic and honest.

“Trusts cannot guarantee that these problems will not happen. What they can do – and are doing – is to have strong and well developed plans in place to identify when they are struggling to cope, so they can call on support to ensure patients get the best care possible.”