Health Committee to scrutinise emergency care
16 December 2013
On Tuesday 21 January the Health Committee will take oral evidence from the Sir Bruce Keogh, Medical Director of NHS England, to investigate the recent performance of Accident and Emergency units.
The Health Committee’s report examining Urgent and Emergency Care, published in July 2013, highlighted concerns about both the short term resilience off NHS emergency urgent and emergency care and the future structure of the service. The Department of Health announced in September 2013 that an additional £250 million would be made available to support the emergency care system, including £221 million allocated across 53 NHS trusts in areas regarded as high risk. This allocation was followed up in November 2013 by a further £150 million distributed across 157 Clinical Commissioning Groups.
In November 2013 Sir Bruce Keogh published the first report of NHS England’s urgent and emergency care review. The report outlined proposals to better coordinate and organise Urgent Care Centres and tier the delivery of emergency care through Emergency Centres and Major Emergency Centres.
The Committee will take evidence from Sir Bruce Keogh to examine both the findings of his review and the winter performance of emergency and urgent care services.
There is no formal call for evidence for this hearing, but the Committee would be pleased to receive written submissions on the allocation and use of the additional funding made available to support the emergency and urgent care system over winter 2013–14 and the performance of emergency departments in this period.
Written evidence must be submitted via the web portal and the deadline for submitting written evidence is Wednesday 16 January 2014 (please note that the portal will close shortly after the midday deadline).
Notes for Editors: The Committee's report into Urgent and Emergency Services was published on 24 July 2013 as HC 171 (PDF 1.79MB).