Hornchurch & Upminster MP, Julia Lopez, has visited Queen’s Hospital and met the Chief Executive of the London Ambulance Service (LAS) on behalf of Havering residents to understand how the NHS is preparing for winter pressures.
Mrs Lopez wanted to raise with hospital and ambulance executives some of the cases shared by her constituents about service levels, and follow up meetings she had earlier in the year about the urgent care improvement plans that BHRUT - the hospital trust which runs Queen’s Hospital - has been putting into action.
Last year, Queen’s Hospital opened a new Ambulance Receiving Centre (ARC) to cut handover times into hospital care and Mrs Lopez was shown how the Centre triages patients. The ARC has led to better communication between the hospital team and London Ambulance Service such that a range of new approaches to emergency calls is now being developed and 13 000 hours of paramedics’ time has already been saved. She also discussed stroke services, recruitment and improvements to primary care access for those who turn up at hospital looking for routine treatment.
Mrs Lopez followed up her visit to Queen’s with a meeting this morning with the Chief Executive of the London Ambulance Service (LAS), Daniel Elkeles, to discuss specific casework concerns highlighted by constituents as well as the broader operational challenges facing the service and their efforts to reduce ambulance response times.
A range of programmes are being drawn up to improve response times in the face of substantial winter pressures across North East London. These include:
- From 17 October, a new Physician Response Unit which brings the Emergency Department to the patient by having a rapid response car, senior emergency medicine doctor and ambulance clinician attend emergency calls, helping people stay at home. This system has been working well in Barts and will soon be rolled out to Havering. Read more here.
- A joint national pilot with the West Midland Ambulance service to undertake a fuller clinical assessment of category 2 calls (which can range from patients suffering from a stroke to major burns or sepsis) so that patients get the most appropriate treatment as quickly as possible.
Mrs Lopez’s visit and meetings came as her work to champion the new St George’s NHS Hub in Hornchurch continues to progress. The St George’s NHS Hub, to be delivered on Suttons Lane, is part of the local MP’s plan to make sure that short term service improvements of the kind discussed with Queen’s and the LAS are complemented by medium term efforts to increase the capacity of the NHS in North East London. The building of this critical new NHS facility will take pressure off Queen’s and make sure social and health care are better integrated, keeping patients out of hospital and cared for nearer to home.
Speaking of the plan, Mrs Lopez said ‘Our part of the capital has particularly acute challenges because of our large elderly population, many of whom have substantial social and health care needs. I am glad to work with Queen’s and the London Ambulance Service to help tackle some of the immediate challenges of making sure patients are cared for in the right setting and get access to fast help when they most urgently need it. But there is a bigger, longer term challenge in increasing capacity in the area and attracting the quality medical staff we need. Queen’s is making great progress on the latter, and the LAS have an amazing apprenticeship programme that is building a strong pipeline of talent. But my team and I also continue relentlessly to push for the delivery of the new St George’s NHS Hub in Hornchurch. We had a very positive meeting with the NHS team leading on this last week and hope to share an exciting update with residents soon on progress’.
