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

Healthwatch Havering undertook an Enter and View visit to the Emergency Department at Queens Hospital during the period 27 to 29 September.  They spoke to ten people.

Key findings included:

• The physical environment of Accident & Emergency Services at Queen’s Hospital has changed beyond recognition since before the Covid pandemic. It is a great improvement on what went before; and the ground-breaking Ambulance Receiving Centre means that patients arriving by ambulance for whom immediate treatment is not required, can be looked after in a better way than simply waiting in the vehicle until they can be seen.
• Changes were needed to the urgent care and out of hours GP services to assist people to get other parts of the hospital.  The triage system needed to be expanded in periods of high demand.
• Closer attention should be paid to the cleaning and general maintenance of cubicles in the Streaming area as they can sometimes present a poor impression. Emergency Department
• Whilst capacity, within the department and the wider hospital, is the biggest challenge for the department, the lack of beds makes it a challenge to give patients the care and experience they deserve and, is the single biggest cause of long waits in the department.
• Discharge from hospital continues to be a cause of delay in getting patients from the ED to a mainstream ward as difficulties in transferring patients to settings where social care can be provided mean that patients may remain in hospital for longer than is clinical necessary.
• The overlap between the urgent treatment centre and the emergency department and ED means that some patients are still being inappropriately referred to the ED. Greater involvement of ED staff in the Streaming process might alleviate this.
• Although the Ambulance Receiving Centre is said to be temporary, there is no doubt that it is a considerable improvement on the arrangements that applied before its introduction. Whilst ideally patients should be taken straight from ambulance to the ED, for the foreseeable future some sort of holding arrangement will be needed and the ARC is important in that.