The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE) has warmly welcomed the publication of PEOPLE FIRST, a new resource developed by members of the Care Quality Commission’s National Emergency Medicine Specialist Advisor Forum, in collaboration with specialists working across urgent and emergency care, including AACE.
Its aim is to support the design of person-centred urgent and emergency care services and encourage innovation across integrated care systems.
Anna Parry, Deputy Managing Director of AACE, says:
PEOPLE FIRST is a very special new resource that we believe should be thoroughly embraced by all system leaders within health and social care. It was developed following input from a broad range of highly experienced people within the urgent and emergency care field at the invitation of the Care Quality Commission and has patient safety and the improvement of patient care at its very core.
This practical resource contains a range of positive initiatives and case studies that show how different parts of the system have genuinely put patients and service users first – across the entirety of their health and social care journey – which has delivered significant benefits for organisations and individuals alike. We hope that these examples can be learning points for others as well as a catalyst for the development of similar initiatives elsewhere within the system.
Resolving the major issues that we face today cannot be done by one person, one organisation or one sector; we need a whole system approach to resolving major problems such as hospital handover delays, which is why we were pleased to see examples of hospitals that are managing their handovers efficiently within the new resource, as well as an acknowledgement of the critical importance of system-wide risk sharing.
Finally we were also pleased to see that PEOPLE FIRST includes a link to the online AACE repository for Safely Reducing Avoidable Conveyance, where we collate initiatives that are working well to safely avoid conveyance to emergency departments in order to ensure patients get the right care in the right place, first time.
