Urgent and Emergency Care for Minor Conditions
The Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) Minors Programme was established in 2021 to focus on reducing the number of people with minor conditions who are managed within Emergency Departments (ED) to enable them to concentrate on providing care to patients with life threatening conditions.
The programme consisted of new and enhanced interventions to try and reduce people attending ED with minor conditions including:
- Targeted Communications Campaign, to encourage patients to access their GP and NHS 111 instead of walking into ED.
- System Clinical Assessment Service (CAS) enhancing NHS 111 offer, a multidisciplinary co-located workforce remotely assessing and managing people with urgent needs.
- Expansion of Community Pharmacy Consultation Service, encouraging utilisation of digital referrals from GPs, and pilot direct booking from Urgent Treatment Centres and EDs into a consultation with a community pharmacist
- Enhanced Front Door Model including an ED Streaming Tool, to help stream patients away from ED to alternative services.
Our impact
Our Clinical Effectiveness Team supported interdisciplinary colleagues to develop a pragmatic evaluation approach within this multifaceted programme.
The evaluation provided various findings, including initial evidence that the System CAS model reduced the South Western Ambulance Service (SWASFT) clinical queue and subsequent risk to the system and indicated the model could be developed to provide further benefit with wider application to frailty, complexity, mental health and paediatrics.
The evaluation was also an opportunity to upskill staff and provided learning around the importance of linking equality impact assessments with evaluation work and how to better evaluate in complexity.