Asking BHRUT to produce report on Erica Ward promised to me on 21st January & Draft letter

The detail below may seem rather dry, but the purpose is find out why BHRUT are restricting same day emergency care at Erica Ward for ambulatory patients at King George.

It must be right for BHRUT to quantify how many patients are being denied care at King George and sent to Queens per the photo above. Email sent earlier today follows:

Dear Trust Secretary

Please can you forward this email to your chair and CE

Dear Chris & Joe

You should always take it as a given that I have immense respect for the work of your board.

However, I hope you can understand the job of any campaigner is to ask awkward questions.

The public record will show that I and others have been challenging what is on going on with ambulatory care at King George Hospital. I was assured a briefing regarding ambulatory care at King George at Health and Well being board on 21st January  per my facebook post Andy Walker , I chased it up at the Redbridge CCG meeting on 31st January, but nothing has come back.

Consequently, I am minded to write a letter to the local press in order to get some answers. I will send it on 22nd February unless I get a satisfactory briefing from you on the subject.

My draft is:

Dear Sir

The Ambulatory Care Unit at King George Hospital, which provides same day emergency care for the elderly frail discriminates against the younger patients who are denied care and transferred to Queens.

When challenged about this , NHS managers say that the "low levels of admitted adult patients" at King George justify this discrimination.

This argument does not stand scrutiny. Other hospitals in East London provide ambulatory care for all ages. Worthing Hospital with a high proportion of elderly residents provides ambulatory care for all residents. NHS managers have failed to deliver on a promise to provide a briefing about this discrimination on 21st January.

Without this briefing, it seems reasonable to believe that the discrimination is motivated by the new plan to close King George A&E and turn King George into a centre of excellence for the elderly published in October 2018. Local NHS managers sought funding to implement this new plan to close King George despite committing to a review of the closure in 2017.

There is a walk from King George Hospital at 2pm for a meeting at 3pm Ilford Town Hall on the 30th March to say this new plan to close King George A&E needs to be scrapped and that local NHS managers are not suited to carry out the review into King George as they are biased in favour of closing King George A&E.

ENDS

Andy Walker

PS extracts from Future Hospital Programme

Studies of best practice are listed, one is

 Worthing Hospital FH development site report - full

 Extracts about ambulatory care follow

"A&E Performance: Over the past 3 years, Worthing Hospital A&E has experienced a 4.5% average annual growth in attendances by patients over 65, 2.1% average annual growth overall to an annual attendance of 65,000. There has been an 8% average annual growth in emergency admissions. Over this period, the trust has maintained the 95% target for A&E for patients to be seen and discharged or admitted within 4 hours and has remained in the top 5% of performing Trusts in the country. Acknowledging that the 4-hour target is a measure of whole-system performance, the Emergency Floor has contributed to improving flow out of A&E as patients referred by GPs should no longer wait in the A&E department on arrival. Within 2 months of opening the Emergency Floor there was a measurable reduction in the number of patients breaching the 4-hour target of 8–11% as the number of patients being discharged within 24 hours increased and the utilisation of ambulatory care improved (Figure 7). 

&

Ambulatory Care: Ambulatory emergency care (AEC) has advanced significantly over the past 5 years and has played a major role in the success of the Emergency Floor project. It is likely that this has been the single most important factor in reducing admissions to the hospital and particularly so for surgical patients - many of whom required rapid assessment and access to a senior decision maker to agree on a management plan - but did not require overnight admission. It is difficult to isolate the particular impact that ambulatory care has had, but it is possible that organisations that already have a well-established ambulatory service for their surgical patients may not see the impact that was demonstrated here.