Written question WQ84119

Welsh Government is supporting health boards across Wales to undertake a range of initiatives to improve resilience of emergency departments over the winter through a national Emergency Department enabling programme. These include:

• Dedicated emergency care staff to support triage, flow and ambulance patient handovers;

• Additional staff and training to improve patient safety and identification and monitoring of patient risk levels in emergency departments;

• Increasing available physical capacity, including additional cleaning teams to enable capacity in emergency departments and ambulance vehicles to be freed-up more quickly between patients;

• Improved patient transfer or discharge from emergency departments for older and frail patients.

This is in addition to the range of whole system actions already in progress to better manage people in the community, improve flow and reduce pressure on emergency departments. This includes:

• The national roll-out of NHS 111 Wales, new pathways for mental health and a significantly improved online platform to enable people with urgent care needs to be signposted to the right place, first time;

• The establishment of clinical assessment and streaming hubs to enable scheduling of people into Emergency Departments or Minor Injuries Units;

• The roll-out of urgent primary care centres across Wales to better manage urgent care demand away from busy Emergency Departments and GP services;

• An additional £5m to support the Welsh Ambulance Service to better manage patients remotely, and focus on reducing transport to Emergency Departments where it is clinically safe to do so;

• Establishment of same day emergency care services in each acute hospital to support people who may have previously been managed through Emergency Departments, and been admitted to hospital, to return home on the same day where it is clinically safe; and

• A new transformational programme intended to support improvement in patient flow through the hospital system and out into the community, improving experience and safety as well as reducing the time spent by patients in Emergency Departments when waiting for hospital beds.

These whole system actions are supported by £25m recurrent funding made available to support delivery of our six goals for urgent and emergency care.

Regional Partnership Boards have also received allocations totalling £9.8m to support people to return to their local communities after admission to hospital this winter. This will help reduce long stays in hospital, improve hospital patient discharges and ease the pressure on hospital beds.