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Analysis: Hopes that new A&E will signal new era for care

Seanín Graham
Seanín Graham Seanín Graham

IT is just over a year since a taskforce on tackling the appalling trolley waits crisis at A&E hospital departments across Northern Ireland was set up.

Ordered by former health minster Edwin Poots and headed up by Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Michael McBride and Chief Nursing Officer Charlotte McArdle, its remit was to axe 12-hour waiting time breaches by last Christmas.

On this key aim, it has clearly failed - and spectacularly so. By April of this year, there were 223 breaches of the 12-hour target at the RVH, compared with 89 in the same month last year.

The DUP health minister also demanded "significant progress" in A&E units meeting the ‘gold standard’ four-hour target within 18 months.

The CMO taskforce - Dr McBride is also the interim chief executive of the Belfast Trust - is the latest in a number of troubleshooting bodies catapulted in to solve waiting time problems following high-profile patient failings or damning probes.

While there has been some improvement since April, the Belfast Trust's medical director has admitted that A&E patients are "still waiting too long".

Dr Cathy Jack made her comments during a media tour of the state-of-the-art new A&E building, during which she and her colleagues appeared genuinely optimistic the move will inject much-needed morale into a workforce that is continually firefighting.

Dr Jack spoke of the need for a "climate change" but was realistic enough to point out that a bigger new-build and more modern equipment will not solve their problems overnight.

While the Department of Health has admitted its taskforce failed to make the "in-roads" it had hoped for in relation to waiting times, a spokesman pointed to the "unprecedented increase" in patients requiring treatment for complex conditions.

It is accepted that the admission of more elderly people with "complex" illnesses puts a massive strain on our A&E care – but this is not a new phenomenon and something which should have been planned for a decade ago.

It can only be hoped that this week's long-awaited opening of the new A&E, with increased frontline nursing and medical staff and "new models of working" will bring about the improvements desperately needed – both for patients and overstretched A&E teams.