Pilot scheme to free up specialists’ time

PATIENTS seeking emergency treatment at the Royal Free in Hampstead (pictured) could end up seeing a GP under a pilot scheme that started at the hospital this week.
Managers have joined forces with Camidoc, a GP co-operative, and the Camden Primary Care Trust (PCT) to trial an out-of-hours general practitioner service based on the lower ground floor.
Patients attending the accident and emergency (A&E) department who are judged not to need emergency treatment will now be referred to the GP, from Monday to Friday, 7pm to midnight and from midday to midnight at weekends.
A hospital spokeswoman said the service would ease pressure on A&E services at the Royal Free, which had increased by nearly 24 per cent since 2002.
The scheme will also help the hospital meet strict national targets imposed by the Department of Health which requires A&E departments to treat and discharge all patients within four hours.
Hospital managers said patients referred to the GP would no longer be monitored against the four-hour targets as they would not be considered patients.
One hospital insider, who did not want to be named, said the scheme was “another way to fiddle figures, while patients wait”.
But a spokeswoman said the initiative had been “driven by the need to respond to the significant increase in numbers of patients attending A&E.”
She added: “Staff have noticed that a large number of these patients could be more appropriately treated in primary care. If primary care patients are being seen by an alternative service it allows the trust to focus on patients who need the specific expertise and skills of the A&E team. Although we hope this new service will help us to provide a more focused service, we would never compromise patient care in order to reach a target.”
Arthur Brill, chairman of the Royal Free’s patient and public involvement forum which monitors hospital services, said he had not been told about the scheme.
He said: “There is so much pressure on them to fulfil these targets. I cannot comment on this scheme because I don’t know enough about it.”
Anders Martin, an A&E consultant at the Royal Free, said: “Although the percentage of patients seen and treated in less than four hours is above 98 per cent, to sustain this good performance we need to focus on patients with problems who really need emergency care.”