The same-day emergency care and urgent treatment centres (UTC) – which treat and discharge patients in the same day – are part of plans to free up hospital beds for patients in serious emergencies.
Patients will be directed to either a UTC or a hospital by 999 call handlers, or taken there by ambulances. A child injured after falling off a skateboard would be one example of a case directed to a mini A&E.
The location of the 40 new urgent treatment centres will be decided by the Department of Health after NHS trusts bid for them, it is understood.
The £450m plan contains a range of pledges and ambitions aimed at avoiding another winter A&E crisis which last year saw corridor care become endemic as clinicians battled a quad-demic of viruses.
A key focus is on caring for people closer to their homes and “improving flow through hospitals” to avoid patients waiting over 12 hours to be seen and “making progress on eliminating corridor care”.
League tables are being introduced for emergency departments – something the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) had been calling for – to improve persistently failing trusts and drive up performance. Ambulance waiting times for category 2 patients – such as those suffering stroke, heart attack, sepsis or major trauma – will be cut by more than 14 per cent, from 35 to 30 minutes. A previous target of 18 minutes has been repeatedly missed. A maximum 45-minute target for patients to be handed over to A&E has been set, to “eradicate” ambulance queues outside hospitals and “get 550,000 more ambulances back on the road for patients”. 500 new ambulances will also be rolled out across the country by March 2026. 15 mental health crisis assessment centres, designed to ensure mentally ill people do not have to wait in A&E for hours, will open across England to offer 24/7 care.The Government wants to slash the number of patients waiting more than 12 hours for a hospital bed – or to be discharged from A&E – so this occurs “less than 10 per cent of the time”. Around 1.7 million attendances at A&E every year currently exceed this time frame.
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Streeting said: “No patient should ever be left waiting for hours in hospital corridors or for an ambulance which ought to arrive in minutes.
“Far too many patients are ending up in A&E who don’t need or want to be there, because there isn’t anywhere else available.
Under the plans, paramedics will play a bigger role in the community, with patients given “more effective treatment at the scene of an accident or in their own homes from ambulance crews”.
The NHS is also pledging better use of virtual wards, where patients are monitored by hospital staff from their home, and there are plans to drive up vaccination rates among NHS staff to help protect patients.
How doctors have reacted
But he raised concerns about how the maximum 45-minute ambulance handover will be achieved “without exposing patients to risk and increasing overcrowding in our departments”.
The Royal College of Physicians said success will depend on “long-term investment in staffing, better integration between hospital, community and social care, and a stronger focus on the needs of older patients and those living with frailty”.
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