Enter and view: Queen’s Hospital, Romford: Accident & Emergency Services

Healthwatch Havering report on Enter and View and informal visits to Accident and Emergency services at Queen's Hospital, Romford between December 2023 and November 2024.  They spoke to 17 patients

Over all, the team were impressed by the generally calm and well-ordered management of the ED, despite the severe pressure under which staff were working. However, the team were a little concerned that, when decisions were made to increase staff numbers due to the corridors being populated, only basic grade HCAs are recruited where so many of patients seen in these areas appeared to be very unwell and the ratio of patients to staff seemed a little high for one person to cope with possible sudden emergencies. The team were also concerned at the apparent lack of speedy response from NELFT to requests for assistance in dealing with mental health admissions. Queen’s Hospital does not have a mental health/psychiatric facility or an establishment of staff to provide appropriately trained staff to deal with these admissions in the short term. Therefore, this is an unbudgeted cost to an already overspent department. The team were shocked to learn that, on occasions, it had been necessary to provide security staff, in addition to nursing staff, over considerable lengths of time to care for these patients.

The Accident and Emergency services at Queen’s Hospital are the busiest in North East London and among the busiest in Greater London, and indeed England as a whole. Queen’s Hospital now serves a population far larger than that envisaged when it was planned some 25 years ago. This increased population is a primary cause of the pressures under which the hospital operates, although cultural changes – especially since the COVID disruption of 2020/21 – among the population also play their part. That said, most staff working in A&E want to do the best they can for their patients and find the constraints that they face frustrating.

These constraints have no specific cause: the growth in population could not have been foreseen; the lack of space is an inevitable consequence of having to deal with more and more people in accommodation that is hampered by its physical environment. There are mitigations in hand: the transfer to the recently opened St George’s Health and Wellbeing Centre in Hornchurch provides an opportunity for vacated accommodation to be repurposed for use either directly or indirectly by freeing up space for A&E services.