John Smithson

Review of Huddersfield and Bradford Roya...

I know A&E is under very great pressure and would ...

I know A&E is under very great pressure and would like to suggest some ways to be helpful.
Relevant information communicated effectively is the key to a good service. My suggestions are:
1) All NHS staff wear 'uniforms' of varying colour depending on their role or seniority. If you were to produce a poster with a brief (probably one word in many cases) showing what the job title (& role if necessary) was it would help a lot. I suggest that the standard half-body pictures are used.
2) Category of problem. All patients are, as I understand it, classified into a number of categories indicating the priority in terms of need to treat and obviously patients are dealt with in priority order. It would help if there were a poster chart indicating briefly what the categories are and including a statement to the effect that everybody is dealt with in priority order.
Each patient should be told what category they are in.
There is an electronic screen which indicates the expected waiting times for triage and for treatment and it frequently changes to reflect the current position.
It would help if it were possible to indicate the expected waiting times for each category - I appreciate that this would require some investment in technology but it would help a lot to make the service more patient friendly.
As an example last night (Friday/Saturday 15/16-2-19) there was a verbal announcement (by a sister I think) that they were a Doctor short and waiting times would be 5 hours (or more?) and if we wanted to go and see our GP on Monday we could. Nothing was said about categories so nobody really new what risk they were taking if they did go home. (I also think the person making the statement needs some training in customer service as when she was asked about priority she more or less simply repeated her message - I had to press her quite firmly before she would check our category so that we new how we stood)