© 2003 BMJ Publishing Group, British Association for Accident & Emergency Medicine, & Faculty of Accident & Emergency Medicine
EDITORIAL
Emergency care
Reforming emergency care; for patients
Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Health, House of Commons, London, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
David Lammy, MP
Working together for the benefit of patients
Keywords: emergency care
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Emergency care is important to me for lots of reasons, but for one in particular: it’s important to patients. We know that A&E services—and by implication all the components that make up the whole emergency care system—are among patients’ top concerns.
Within A&E I believe a critical concern for patients is how long they have to wait for clinical care, and I can’t blame them. When you are in pain, frightened, or with a sick child each hour you wait feels like purgatory. And when patients get stressed the staff can suffer too.
We have a target for waiting times in A&E—by the end of 2004, no one (unless it’s clinically advisable) should spend more than four hours between arrival and admission, transfer or discharge. I think that is reasonable and achievable, even modest in some ways, but I don’t expect it to happen by magic. The way
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