By Hollie Harris
Emergency Departments are becoming increasingly overloaded with non-life threatening patients and have launched a new campaign to educate the community about the available services that can provide reliable and appropriate medical treatment.
Right Place, Right Time is the campaign including a new website to help residents understand the care they can locate in their local area, rather than going straight to the hospital.
Emergency Physician Dr Phebe O’Mullane said that a recent survey demonstrated that people were largely unaware of alternative services.
“Emergency Departments are not always the best option for people presenting with a non-life threatening condition,” Dr O’Mullane said.
“Over half of the patients who are presenting to Emergency are non-urgent and could be better and certainly faster managed by using other options,” she said.
“Behind closed doors, there are many urgent patients being tended to and the wait in Emergency is sometimes very long.
People can be frustrated, especially when they are injured or sick assuming they are not being looked after but Emergency takes cases based on how life-threatening the case is, not who was in first.
“In the moments of stress, most people don’t know what to do and can’t think through their options very clearly but if you plan it beforehand and write it down, you can save yourself a long night waiting in the ER.”
Make a health plan for your family. This may include writing down numbers, checking the National Health Service Directory, which tells you who is available around you, contacting the 24-hour 13 Health phone number to speak to a registered nurse, completing a health symptom checker online or calling an after hours GP service or one of the 24-hour services which are now available.
The right place at the right time initiative is to inform the community of the options to take before landing on the doorstep of an ER.
