Urgent and emergency care transformation

We will provide safe and effective urgent care for people in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin by working with our partners to enhance patient care. We will do this through improved services and better access to urgent and emergency care.

Our ambition is to make sure our patients continue to be provided with high quality services outside of hospital. This is a key area of work that is bound to our system wide urgent and emergency care improvement plan. This work will complement other Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin Partnership work programmes, which aim to reduce unnecessary and unplanned care in our local health and care system.

We want our patients to have access and knowledge of all our services so that they’re treated in the right place first time, to meet their needs.

One of our main areas of focus is to make sure we have a range of community-based services, including pharmacy, promotion of self-care, NHS 111, extended GP access, joined up with hospital and community care services to offer an effective and inclusive service to patients. We will be working collaboratively with our partners to ensure that patients and carers have all the information that they need to make the right decision on which service to access first, when seeking advice or help for further care. This will help patients with an urgent need to be quickly and safely directed to an urgent care service and those with serious or life-threatening conditions will be assessed and treated in an emergency department.

What do we want to achieve with this work?

To reduce waiting times in our Accident and Emergency department (A&E/ED)
To review and develop our service offer to support people who need access to care and support where this is not an emergency
To improve access to a range of non-acute urgent care services
To work with our partners on alternative pathways to A & E/ED subsequently reducing Ambulance handover delays
To ensure that patients are discharged from hospital as soon as they are medically fit where possible
To implement best practice, improve efficiencies, reduce duplication, and streamline clinical routes to treatment
To strengthen planning and monitoring of our urgent and emergency care services to improve patient outcomes
To ensure that our communications for patients provide information about our services to support them to choosing the right service first time