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NEWS RELEASE FROM THE Issued 3rd November 2003 HOSPITAL TENTS IDEA FOR EMERGENCY PATIENTS SLATED AS ‘SIGN OF ULTIMATE FAILURE’ NO BRITISH PRIME MINISTER COULD ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN, SAY NURSING HOME LEADERS A proposal that patients being brought into hospital by ambulance should have to stay in inflatable outdoor tents until the accident and emergency department is ready to accept them has been dismissed as ‘crazy’. The Registered Nursing Home Association (RNHA) said it showed just how far the Government had failed to provide a ‘joined up health care system’ in which ambulance services, hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities were used to maximum effect. Keeping very sick people in tents would, if it happened, be a sign of the ultimate failure of Government health policy, claimed the RNHA. RNHA chief executive officer Frank Ursell said: “The fact that this is being put forward as part of contingency planning by health services for the coming winter is incredible. Such desperate measures could be avoided if hospital bed blocking was addressed more effectively. “As it is, in peak winter months accident and emergency departments can’t cope with a major influx of patients because there isn’t any room on the wards for patients who need to be admitted. The whole system then runs the risk of silting up.” He added: “While on any given day of the week there may be up to 4,000 hospital beds occupied by patients who are well enough to be discharged from an acute ward but not well enough to go straight home, there are thousands of unfilled places in nursing homes. “Even though a nursing home place costs three to four times less than a hospital bed, people are staying in hospital longer than they should. And so we go round full circle to the crazy idea that people arriving in ambulances might be denied access to a hospital and pushed into tents outside until a place becomes available in the accident and emergency department.” Over recent years the RNHA has been campaigning hard to get the Government to make better use of Britain’s thousands of nursing homes. But local authorities, which meet a major proportion of the cost of care for people who qualify for public funding, have either been purchasing fewer places or refusing to meet nursing homes’ rising costs. Said Mr Ursell: “How tragic it is that all the buck-passing and hand-wringing of recent years by this country’s politicians and policy-makers has brought us to the point where an older person with a severe chest condition could, in a certain set of circumstances this winter, be offloaded into a makeshift tent erected in a hospital car park. Let us hope it doesn’t happen. The fact that it is even being contemplated reveals the mire into which our much-vaunted health system is sinking.” He concluded: “What we need to see is vision, determination and commitment at the top. Surely no British Prime Minister or Secretary of State for Health could sit back and allow things to reach this point. If they can pump billions into the Iraq conflict, why can’t it be found for this country’s sick and elderly when they need it? The time has come, Mr Blair, for action at home.” The RNHA expects other national organisations concerned with the welfare of older people to make new representations to the Government on the issue of funding and priorities. END For further information and comment, please contact: Frank Ursell, Chief Executive Officer, Registered Nursing Home Association |
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