Top NHS boss calls for two hour waiting target for the sickest A&E patients and says ‘a lot of people’ could be seen elsewhere
Jim Mackey is meeting medics today to discuss new ways of managing overcrowded casualty units
A TOP NHS boss floated the idea of a new two hour waiting target for the sickest A&E patients yesterday.
NHS chief Jim Mackey insisted the four hour target would not “be dropped” but could be improved.
He told MPs he was meeting medics today to discuss new ways of managing overcrowded casualty units.
The NHS Improvement boss said: “There should be a standard that says if you’re very sick or have certain conditions you should be seen by a doctor in two hours or three hours, that’s what we are going to consider.”
Asked if waiting times could be lengthened, he added: “We are not looking at any relaxation of targets or standards.”
He said emergency medics needed to be able to care for the most poorly patients and there were “a lot of people” in A&E that could be seen elsewhere.
Committee chair Meg Hillier said the problems of people turning up to A&E with non-emergency conditions were “not new”.
Mr Mackey agreed but said the problem had “grown significantly”.
But he said procedures for emergencies like suspected sepsis cases now took much longer to deal with.
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Meanwhile, Britain spends almost a THIRD less per person on healthcare than Germany – under pressure NHS chief Simon Stevens revealed yesterday.
He shamed the Government by insisting Britain lags behind other top EU countries on key health measures such as number of beds.
And he interrupted his colleague’s defence of Britain’s health spend as he delivered the blistering evidence to MPs.
The Department of Health’s top mandarin Chris Wormald had insisted total health spending was around the average for OECD advanced countries.
But a furious Simon Stevens cut him off to insist that was because the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development included nations such as Mexico.
But holding up a newspaper report he said: “If you look at countries we would normally compare ourselves to we are spending substantially less - 30 per cent less per person than the Germans are.”
Figures for 2013 put Germany healthcare spending on 11 per cent of GDP against 8.5 per cent for the UK.
An OECD report from November claimed the NHS is among the worst in the EU for the numbers of doctors, hospital beds and cancer scanners.
Britain has the shortest maternity stays of any country in the EU, the OECD said.