Improving critical care flow: admissions, discharges, and systemic pressures

The covid-19 pandemic brought to the public’s attention how important critical care services are to modern healthcare. The scramble to rapidly upscale UK critical care bed capacity was avoidable. Better staffed bed capacity in critical care going into the pandemic would have enabled a faster, improved exit from it. In healthcare, critical care services are a good indicator of how well secondary healthcare services are functioning. If critical care is operating effectively, including timely admissions and discharges, then the hospital overall will generally be functioning well. Unfortunately, critical care services in the UK have long shown inadequate admission and discharge capability, mirroring the wider NHS’s difficulties with capacity and patient flow.The crisis seen recently in emergency departments across the UK is symptomatic of the problems spanning primary and secondary healthcare. Warnings were repeatedly made and ignored before this pandemic. Attributing the current NHS crisis to covid-19 is short-sighted and hinders…
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