All Journals from Tim Cooksley
NHS urgent and emergency care (UEC) remains under immense and unsustainable pressure. This is increasingly causing harm to patients and emotional trauma to the staff striving to deliver basic standards of care.
NHS urgent and emergency care is under intolerable strain. This strain is increasingly causing harm to patients. Timely and high-quality patient care is often not being delivered due to overcrowding driven by workforce and capacity constraints. This drives low staff morale perpetuating burn out and high absence levels which currently dominate. Whilst COVID19 has accentuated and arguably expedited the crisis; the spiral of decline in urgent and emergency care has been decade long and unless urgent action is taken, we may not yet have reached its nadir.
Urgent and emergency care services remain under huge pressures with concerns regarding overcrowding, delays in patient care and exhausted staff with increasing unsustainable workforce pressures. Short term mitigation measures are needed alongside the imperative need to ensure long-term innovative and sustainable measures to ensure that the NHS can deliver high quality acute and emergency care.
Acute Medicine remains a specialty in its infancy and, as such, faces many challenges associated with developing new ways of working. As the Society for Acute Medicine celebrates its 18th birthday the extraordinary role of Acute Medicine in both maintaining and indeed enhancing the care and welfare of patients is increasingly evident. However, scepticism still persists among some colleagues with regards to its effectiveness – a perception heightened by the difficult environment that currently pervades in acute and emergency care in the UK which mirrors the experience of many countries internationally.
As those working in Acute Medicine gather at SAMsterDAM2, the spring conference of the Society for Acute Medicine, the growth, reputation and global representation of the specialty continues to grow. Alongside, the traditional strongholds of the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Denmark and Australia growth in Asia continues with an AMU now established in Pakistan among other countries.