5.5 Emergency care
Emergency care (from the patient’s perspective) includes GPs, walk-in
centres, minor injuries units, urgent care centres, NHS 111 or equivalent,
local pharmacists, local mental health teams, Accident and Emergency (A&E)
departments at general hospitals, and dialling 999 for an ambulance. From
a provider’s perspective, emergency care is composed only of ambulance
services and A&E; the rest are part of the urgent care system. There is no
official definition of emergency services.
Emergency care is provided free of charge. A&E departments are open 24/7
throughout the year, while minor injury units and walk-in centres are generally
open for fewer hours. Patients mostly self-refer to emergency services, but they
can be referred by health care personnel.
Health systems in transition United Kingdom 85
There are 11 ambulance services in England (of which 6 are NHS Trusts
and 5 are Foundation Trusts) and one each in Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland. Because of the large sparsely populated areas in Scotland with poor
road access, there is also an air ambulance service operating there. There are
also air ambulance services in England and Wales, but these are provided by
charities. There are 21 air ambulance charities in the United Kingdom – 19 of
these are in England. Emergency medical dispatchers triage calls into three
categories. There has been an increase in calls for ambulances from 1994 to
the present, and indeed the number of calls received has increased more quickly
than the number of vehicles dispatched or the number of patient journeys to
hospital. Emergency calls have historically been prioritized according to three
categories: category A, immediately life-threatening; category B, serious but not
immediately life-threatening; and, category C, not serious or life-threatening.
There are target response times for categories A and B, while category C calls
do not have national targets. In Wales a new system for emergency ambulance
services is being piloted from October 2015 and introduces three new categories
of calls – red (immediately life-threatening), amber (of varying severity but
where patients may require care at the scene) and green (non-serious) – to
replace the current system. The amber category will see patients prioritized on
the basis of clinical need; there will be a range of clinical outcome indicators
to measure the quality, safety and timeliness of care, rather than time-based
targets (Welsh Government, 2015).
Although the Care Quality Commission inspects emergency services
in England, there is limited quality monitoring on the effectiveness of
emergency care across the United Kingdom. However, many emergency
departments monitor their performance against the College of Emergency
Medicine standards.
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland track different sets of
indicators of A&E performance, though all have data on the numbers of
attendances and the time spent waiting in A&E. The latest available data
indicate that Northern Ireland has the highest number of attendances at
major A&E departments relative to population size. However, if minor A&E
departments are included, England’s total rate of A&E attendance is higher
(Baker, 2015). There has been a well-documented increase in new attendances
at A&E in England since 2003, which has received considerable media attention
(The King’s Fund, 2015).
86 Health systems in transition United Kingdom
Waiting times for emergency care in the United Kingdom have been deemed
too long in the past, and England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all
issued targets to cut waiting times across all emergency care services. Wales has
a greater percentage of its A&E episodes lasting over four hours as compared
to England or Scotland (which performed best on this indicator as of 2014/15).
In Northern Ireland over a quarter of A&E patients spent over four hours in
major A&E departments in 2014/15 – the highest rate in the United Kingdom
(Baker, 2015)