Integrating Urgent & Emergency Care
In March 2024, AACE co-published, with NHS Providers and NHS Confederation, a long-term vision for the ambulance sector. The vision provides the context within which we believe ambulance services can significantly contribute to improvement in urgent and emergency care provision across systems.
Collaboration with all partners, in secondary, primary, mental health and community, and our wider stakeholders in our communities, for the benefit of patients, requires greater integration of the urgent and emergency services we, between us, provide.
By acknowledging the potential for change and co-designing system UEC strategies with all partners and stakeholders, the ambulance sector can play a pivotal part in helping to alleviate many of the system pressures and capacity issues, rather than contributing to them.
AACE has been working with the NHSE Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) team, who are also now working closely with the Emergency Care Improvement Support Team (ECIST) and the iUEC team.
In this Further Faster session held in July 2024, we discuss:
- the interface between ambulance and hospital care,
- the impact of hospital handover delays on patient care,
- what the alternatives are to conveying patients to emergency departments (and the limitations of these),
- how we aim to get patients to the right care, first time when someone calls 999 and,
- how integrated care-coordination at the point of call is helping us to get it right with that single touch point,
- how we can identify where, if systems can address critical gaps in services, we can improve outcomes and experience for patients
Download the slide deck here.
A repository of examples of good practice for safely reducing ambulance conveyance to emergency departments
The UEC and Ambulance Repository is now live on the Future NHS platform, with all the previous content published on the AACE safely reducing avoidable conveyance repository, as well as NHSE’s webinar series from 2022 and the 999 and UCR webinars from Spring 2023.
All initiatives are available within a searchable database found here.
The link to the wider site can be found here – UEC and Ambulance Repository.
If you have not already signed up to access the repository you will need to join the Emergency Care Improvement Support Team (ECIST) Future NHS platform, by clicking the ‘Join this Workspace’ button on the page that you are taken to. You should expect to receive access within 48hrs.
If you would like to submit an example of a response model / care pathway, or if you have any questions about the new UEC and Ambulance Repository on NHS Futures, please contact england.ambulance@nhs.net.
