Winter health check

6 Mar 2015 12:26 PM

This summary offers an overview of the system and pulls together information on waiting times in A&E, ambulance response times, daily situation reports from the NHS, and information on flu rates.

• Winter health check

Overview

• There was a sharp increase in the number of patients attending A&E this week, with attendances up more than 20,000 to 426,500, compared with 406,200 the previous week.
• The levels of emergency admissions also rose, with a total of 107,600 – up from 104,800 in the previous week and from 106,000 in the same week last year.
• The percentage of patients waiting 4 hours or less from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge was 91.5% - marginally down from 92.0% in the previous week.
• Over 4 hour waits for admission were up to 9,000, from 8,000 in the previous week
• The NHS111 service continues to reflect the increased demand from the public and is doing an excellent job in terms of protecting both A&E and ambulance services from unnecessary attendances and call outs.
• NHS111 had 255,000 calls for the week ending Sunday 1 March 2015, similar to the previous week’s figure of 261,000.
• The percentage of NHS111 calls answered in 60 seconds was 94.0%, compared with 93.3% in the previous week.
• In the past year NHS111 received more than 12 million calls and, as a result, offered treatment to over two million people who would otherwise have visited A&E, and another 600,000 who would have dialled 999 for an ambulance. This reduces a significant amount of unnecessary pressure on our urgent care services.
• Delayed Transfers of care for the week were down for the second successive week. The average number of beds occupied per day for delayed discharge last week was 3,700 – compared with 3,900 and 4,000 in the previous two weeks.
• Some £700million continues to be injected to support the NHS over this winter. The local NHS says this has helped bolster the NHS with an extra 700 doctors, 4,500 nurses and more than 3,000 extra other staff.
• This increase in staffing has allowed the NHS to open an extra 900 general beds, more than 2,700 acute and specialist beds and over 1,500 beds for those patients who need a little longer to recover. We are also funding more than 1,200 residential and nursing home beds. In the coming weeks more beds will be available.
• The money is also being used to support different initiatives around the country, decided at local level and tailored to local needs through the System Resilience Groups (SRG).
• The national tripartite (NHS England, Monitor and the TDA) is tightly monitoring what is happening so we can spot problems early and take swift action.