RCEM responds to the government’s ‘mandate for the NHS’ and NHSE planning guidance
Thursday 30 January 2025
New missives from the Department of Health and NHS England provide little ‘guidance’ as to how the most dangerous and shameful issues facing Emergency Departments – corridor care and excessive pre-admission waits – are going to be tackled.
That is the assessment of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) following a raft of announcements related to the NHS which have been made today – 30 January 2025.
First came the Department of Health and Social Care’s Road to recovery: the government’s 2025 mandate to NHS England with a foreword from the Health Secretary.
In it, he stated that the new mandate for reform of the NHS reflects patients’ priorities:
Referencing UEC, it says the NHS is tasked with reducing long wait times in A&E and improving ambulance response times. This also includes improving patient flow through mental health crisis pathways.
Following the ‘mandate’ came the 2025/26 priorities and operational planning guidance published by NHS England which was due to be published last December.
The document is a set of guidelines stating how trusts and systems are to operate over the coming financial year. It details where they should focus attention, and which targets are to be prioritised. The areas identified as national priorities in 2025/26 are:
There is also a focus on expanding Same Day Emergency Care and Urgent Treatment Centres aimed at easing pressure on the system.
Responding, RCEM President, Dr Adrian Boyle, said: “Today was a chance for the DHSC and NHSE to really give some guidance about how the national shame of corridor care and long A&E stays before admission will be tackled.
“We are glad to see acknowledgment of the fact that 12-hour waits are increasingly common as we know this is where the risk to patient safety lies – with almost 14,000 deaths associated with these stays in 2023.
“But apart from stating the ambition that ‘a higher proportion of patients admitted, discharged and transferred from ED within 12 hours’, there is little meaningful indication of how this is to be achieved.
“The focus remains on an unambitious four-hour target restricted to one month of the year. How can this be the only marker – especially when you consider more than 1.7million people waited more than 12 hours in 2024?
“Fundamentally corridor care and overcrowding are caused by lack of capacity in, and flow through, our hospitals and we are disappointed to see no meaningful commitments to tackle them.
“All the admission avoidance in the world won’t help an elderly patient waiting on a trolley in a corridor for hours.
“We hope that the promised UEC Reform plan will deliver the detail today’s guidance lacks.”
Elsewhere is has been reported that 2,000 NHS jobs could be at risk in the drive for efficiency, as well as the implementation of a recruitment freeze.
