Sandwell A&E to send patients to GPs to ease winter pressure
Patients will be sent to GPs directly from Sandwell Hospital’s A&E in a bid to ease pressure on staff this winter.
From next month, A&E staff will be able to decide whether patients will be better off being seen by a GP instead.
The patients would be booked in with an available GP practice or walk-in centre somewhere in the Sandwell borough and the results passed to their GP.
It is hoped the move will have a major impact in reducing patients numbers at the A&E where waiting time targets have not been met for the last two years.
Health chiefs are attempting to reach the 95 per cent target of patients seen in four hours by January but are wary about the challenge they face over the winter.
The amount of patients who return to hospital after being sent to a GP will be monitored to judge what impact it has.
Toby Lewis, chief executive of the Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust, which runs Sandwell General, believes the new system will be key to ensuring staff will be able to cope.
He said: “With the major expansion in primary care appointments this is now the right time to be able, for a minority of patients, to offer them the certainty of clinical review in a place more suitable than a major A&E department.
“We will monitor the volume of transfer achieved and also whether patients re-attend A&E after a first visit and discharge to primary care.” The trust was warned this week by the Care Quality Commission that it must get patients who attend A&E seen more quickly. Around 100 patients have been waiting more than four hours to be seen at Sandwell General and City Hospitals and around 80 per cent for 2017 as a whole. The national NHS target is to have 95 per cent seen within that time.
