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Minor illness and injury

  • Last modified date:
    29 August 2007

Around half of patients visiting A&E have relatively minor injuries or illnesses. This area of work is about developing new services and different ways of working to ensure these patients get speedy and appropriate care without jeopardising the care of those who are more seriously ill.

Around half of patients visiting A&E have relatively minor injuries or illnesses. In the past it has often been these patients who have had to wait the longest for treatment.  This area of work is about developing new services and different ways of working to ensure these patients get speedy and appropriate care without jeopardising the care of those who are more seriously ill.

Some key aims

The core aim is to facilitate the treatment & discharge of patients with minor conditions to achieve the overall NHS Plan target for A&E waits:

  • By the end of 2004 no patients will wait more than four hours in A&E from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge.

This aim will be achieved by:

  • Working with the Modernisation Agency in the promotion of See & Treat and other practices that speed up the care within A&E of people with minor injuries or illnesses
  • Minimising the workload on A&E departments by developing and promoting primary care alternatives for patients with minor illnesses and injuries

Work in progress

Most A&E departments have See & Treat schemes in place specifically to target patients with less serious conditions. Under See & Treat, a doctor or nurse assesses the patient as soon as they arrive in A&E and, where possible, treats them straight away. Where schemes are in place trusts are reporting a marked increase in the number of patients they can deal with in four hours or less.

Reform and service redesign in other parts of the health care system - mainly primary care - are also helping to ensure that those with minor complaints don't end up in A&E at all. NHS walk-in centres and minor injuries units - nurse-led, community-based and  requiring no appointment - are already seeing two million patients in the year and calls to NHS Direct  continue to rise.

Future thinking

Access to urgent care for minors outside A&E needs to develop further. NHS Direct and the walk-in centre (WiC) programme will continue to expand, with many new WiCs being located within A&E departments. Access to unscheduled care needs to be rationalised and simplified, so that patients don't need to understand the increasingly complex system to get the best out of it. And See & Treat will continue to spread until all minors breaches of the four hour standard have been eliminated from the system.

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