Written question WQ96549

Our Six Goals for Urgent and Emergency Care national programme is supporting people to access the right care, in the right place, at the first time. Over the last four years, we have provided nearly £100m in Six Goals funding to support health boards and NHS trusts to deliver urgent and emergency care improvements.

I have been clear with health boards of my expectation for improvement and have set out these with a Quality Statement for Care in the Emergency Department.

To support health boards to better match the right capacity with demand in their emergency departments, the Six Goals programme is working with the ‘GIRFT’ (getting it right first time) emergency medicine team. A national summary emergency department information table ‘SEDIT’ tool, which allows benchmarking with more than 190 other emergency departments across the UK, has been established, and we expect health boards to use this information to ‘right size’ their emergency department services.

Each health board has developed an improvement plan for each emergency department based on the priority areas within the quality statement and GIRFT recommendations, and the Six Goals programme is providing active support to enable delivery.

Our urgent and emergency care priorities for 2025-26 include a heightened focus on improving patient flow and care closer to home to release emergency department capacity for those most in need. Health boards have developed their local Six Goals plans aligned to these priorities, each supported by £2.7m in additional funding for 2025-26. I expect delivery of these plans to enable improvements in emergency department performance over the coming weeks and months.