With the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) reporting excessive waits in North Wales Emergency Departments, Welsh Conservative MS for the region, Mark Isherwood, has called for immediate and decisive action.
Questioning the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care in today's meeting of the Welsh Parliament, Mr Isherwood referred to recent data from the RCEM which highlights the scale of the crisis, warning that the prolonged waits are contributing to preventable deaths.
He said:
"The Royal College of Emergency Medicine, RCEM, reports that over a quarter of patients at Wrexham Maelor, nearly a third at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd and over a fifth at Ysbyty Gwynedd waited 12 hours or more for a care decision last month.
"Across Wales, 14 per cent waited 12 hours or longer, the worst February on record. The RCEM estimates that deaths associated with waits of 12 hours or more increased to at least 965 last year, averaging 18 preventable deaths per week.
"Snapshot data provided by them from Wales's 12 Emergency Departments recorded 22 per cent of patients in non-designated spaces. Forty-three per cent of these were awaiting in-patient beds, and 32 per cent were being treated in non-designated spaces - often the sickest patients. As the RCEM states, however, Emergency Department overcrowding is not inevitable.
"So, what action are you taking to improve hospital flow and reduce preventable mortality? And, given that NHS England has adopted a national definition of ‘corridor care’ and will begin publishing monthly corridor care data from May, will you be doing the same, or are you just leaving this for the next Welsh Government?"
Responding, the Cabinet Secretary said:
"Well, I won't be the Minister in May, but I've committed previously to making that data available ... It's obviously important that it's collected on a consistent basis and in a comprehensive way that enables us to have a clear picture. That is improving, but we haven't yet got the system to a place where it's captured in a sufficiently reliable way. I'm pretty confident that that will be resolved by, I would think, the summer. So, that will enable the Government and new Senedd, if it chooses to do that, to publish that data."
