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Increased action is needed to tackle health and social care staffing shortages in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, which have left the region’s urgent and emergency care services struggling to cope and patients at risk of avoidable harm, the Care Quality Commission (“CQC”) said on Friday.

The findings show the region’s urgent and emergency services are under significant pressure; with overcrowding and excessive waiting times in urgent and emergency care departments, delayed ambulance handovers, poor discharge processes, and an increase in delayed discharges among the key issues identified.

This latest review is part of a series of CQC reviews into urgent and emergency care, which considers how services work together in a geographic area to ensure people receive the right care in the right place at the right time. 

Earlier this month, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (“RCEM”) described as “staggering” survey findings showing more than 1,000 patients waiting longer than 12 hours in emergency departments in England every day. It said the findings in its report, Tip of the iceberg: 12-hour stays in the Emergency Department, demonstrated the “deep crisis” facing the NHS and the urgent and emergency care system.

(Source for this article: ‘Staff Shortages Causing Huge Issues in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Warns CQC’, 24 June 2022. Read the full article published by Medscape HERE.)

Mandy Williams, CQC’s director of integrated care, inequalities and improvement, said:

“Despite this pressure, staff went above and beyond for patients in many of the services we inspected in the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Integrated Care System.

“However, people didn’t always receive timely care and treatment in the most appropriate service for their needs.

“This led to overcrowding in urgent and emergency care departments, which created avoidable pressure for staff who were trying to ensure patient safety, and it also delayed ambulance handovers. 

“We found staff shortages in adult social care meant people remained in hospital when they should have been discharged to respite services. This reduced the number of available beds elsewhere in hospitals where patients in emergency departments could be referred.”

Responding to the CQC’s findings, Jan Thomas, chief executive of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough ICS, said: “We have already taken forward a range of service changes to improve urgent and emergency care from projects to reduce ambulance waiting times and investment in GP telephony systems to virtual waiting rooms so people can wait at home rather than in hospital and investment in discharge capacity.”

Investment in GP telephony systems?  It would be interesting to know what telephony systems? For virtual doctor-patient consultations perhaps?

And surely “virtual waiting rooms”, whereby people who need emergency care wait at home until the hospital notifies them there is space to accommodate them is not solving any issues, except perhaps to give the appearance that hospitals are not overcrowded.

Pre-Covid injection roll out, every winter season NHS hospitals suffered “overcrowding.”  Post-Covid injection rollout, it seems as if NHS is in a year-round “winter season.”  Neither the NHS nor the CQC are addressing the elephant in the room – harms caused by the experimental and dangerous Covid injections.

Below are some of our previously published articles which may give some insight into why a year-round winter season could be the “new normal” for the NHS:

• Latest UKHSA Report proves this is a ‘Pandemic of the Fully Vaccinated’ and the data shows the Vaccinated are TWICE as likely to die and are about to overwhelm the NHS, 19 November 2021
• As Many As 123,000 NHS, Health and Social Care Staff May Choose to Resign Rather Than Take the Jab, 13 December 2021
• Triple Vaccinated put the most pressure on the NHS by far over the past 4 weeks according to UKHSA with 74% of Covid-19 hospitalisations recorded among the Vaccinated, 22 January 2022
• NHS publishes Job Advert for MULTIPLE posts in Vaccine Damage Payment Team, 17 February 2022
• 7 Reasons why the NHS needs to close, 5 March 2022
• NHS reveals in FOI that Ambulance Call-Outs for Heart Illness have DOUBLED since Covid-19 Vaccination began among all age groups, 6 June 2022

Source for featured image: Shocking photos reveal the true scale of Britain’s A&E crisis – with mothers and children on floors and pensioners on trolleys being cared for by ‘corridor nurses’, Daily Mail, 7 February 2017