The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE) has welcomed today’s report from the National Audit Office, Managing the flow of patients through hospital from A&E, which highlights the importance of managing patient flow across the whole hospital and wider health and care system.
AACE particularly welcomes Recommendation 2, which calls for a stronger focus on whole-hospital management of patient flow. AACE has long argued that pressure in emergency departments, ambulance handover delays and corridor care are symptoms of wider system challenges and cannot be resolved by focusing on individual parts of the urgent and emergency care pathway in isolation, or indeed, the urgent and emergency care pathway in isolation.
Anna Parry, Managing Director of AACE, said:
“Improving urgent and emergency care requires a focus on the entire patient journey, not just individual parts of the system.
“For ambulance services, this means ensuring that efforts to reduce ambulance handover delays do not simply result in more corridor care, and that tackling corridor care does not come at the expense of patients waiting longer in ambulances outside hospitals.
The answer is not to move pressure from one part of the pathway to another, but to improve flow both throughout hospitals in their entirety and the wider health and care system.
“We particularly welcome and strongly support Recommendation 2 of the report. We know that where patient flow and associated risk is managed across hospitals – from the front door through to discharge – positive and sustained improvements in both hospital handover delays and corridor care follow. This is evidenced in our case studies.”
