Emeritus Prof Christopher MayDec 30

The use of 'escalation areas' in A&E dept.s has become normalised & while the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine sees this as 'big trouble' until there's a major disaster linked to corridor care, our political class & the news media are focussed elsewhere

The problem as always is the movement of patients through hospital systems, which is slowed down by problems of discharge to social care... & that is not going to be fixed anytime soon.

#NHS #health
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/dec/30/ae-nhs-in-trouble-normalised-corridor-care-says-leading-uk-medic

A&Es in ‘big trouble’ because of ‘normalised’ corridor care, says leading UK medic

Emergency medicine specialist says improved social care and efficiency would help crisis in NHS

The Guardian
Show threadPaul Brownjohn

@ChrisMayLA6

I can't help feeling that the NHS is tackling the problem in an arse about face manner - it seems to me that what is needed is the provision of low dependency care areas in NHS hospitals to which recovered patients can be moved from acute wards whilst they wait for suitable long term accommodation thus unblocking desperately needed beds in acute wards.

I live in Luxembourg and I cannot help but compare the delivery of healthcare here with that in the UK. The capital Luxembourg City (population about 136,000) has 3 major hospitals and a further 5 or 6 minor or specialized ones including a dedicated children's hospital and a huge dedicated rehabilitation unit for the victims of strokes and accidents.

In Europe, it is 2nd only to Germany in terms of the number of ITU beds per head of population and was able to to accommodate numerous patients requiring ITU care from Eastern France when that area completely ran out of ITU beds during the Covid pandemic.

Dec 30 at 9:49amWeb
Show threadEmeritus Prof Christopher MayDec 30

@Paulos_the_fog

Yes, I think that's clear; the difficulty is home-care might be a quicker reposes than to upping the numbers of beds as a proportion of population, and fits better with the political class' suspicion of 'slack' capacity (as was explored in this timeline some weeks ago).