Longer summer days when conversations revolve around hosepipe bans and barbeques might seem million miles away from the dark, cold nights of winter.
But right now that’s exactly what NHS Trust leaders are thinking about, as they publish their new Urgent and Emergency Care Plan for England.
They are busy planning their winter response. To devise and implement a battle strategy to prevent the appalling scenes that have played out in emergency departments across the country, with patients on trolleys waiting for hours on end and ambulances stacked up and unable to offload the sickest patients for the care they need and deserve. The basic care they are entitled to.
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Like Christmas TV repeats and snow-capped robins, the NHS winter crisis is a recurring seasonal theme.
The poor care has become normalised. It has come to define the NHS, and that’s why it is so important for Wes Streeting to make it a priority. His Urgent and Emergency Care Plan was trailed back in January when the health service was in the grip of one of its worst winter crises.
The hundreds of millions of pounds in investment, extra ambulances, and new urgent treatment centres are to stop a repeat of those unacceptable emergency department scenes.
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But there’s more: a shift away from hospital-based acute emergency treatment to community-based care. More investment on virtual wards and paramedics armed with a full patient history treating their call-outs in situ, and therefore keeping as many patients away from ED as possible.
The challenge here will be to get NHS and Social Care providers to work together. This has not happened as much as it should or could.
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Keeping patients away from the ED doors will also require a reset in patient expectations. And ED consultants will tell you, as they tell me often, that a significant percentage of patients who turn up at A&E do not need to be there. Their needs are better served in speciality care in the community.
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But they come because the ED never closes. All of these patients need to be triaged and that volume creates the backlogs and lengthy waiting times.
And while the urgent care recovery plan has been broadly supported and welcomed by the royal colleges, there is some concern that not enough has been done to address the crisis in social care.
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The plan does highlight the need to improve patient flow through a hospital, the ability to discharge medically fit patients back into the community and free up beds for waiting patients.
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But for this to happen, social care packages need to be in place for patients who need them. This has been a constant challenge and unless there is significant investment in social care, it will continue to be a problem.
Wes Streeting will say that this will be addressed when he publishes his NHS 10-Year Plan, expected sometime in July.
