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Agenda and minutes

Agenda and minutes

Venue: THE COUNCIL CHAMBER - FIRST FLOOR, TOWN HALL, TOWN HALL SQUARE, LEICESTER

Contact: Graham Carey, Tel 0116 4546356 or Internal 376356 

Items
No. Item

55.

APOLOGIES FOR ABSENCE pdf icon PDF 393 KB

Additional documents:

Minutes:

Apologies for absence were received from Professor Azar Farooqi, Co Chair, Leicester City Clinical Commissioning Group and Chief Superintendent Rob Nixon, Leicestershire Police.

56.

DECLARATIONS OF INTEREST

Members are asked to declare any interests they may have in the business to be discussed at the meeting.

 

Minutes:

Members were asked to declare any interests they may have in the business to be discussed at the meeting.  No such declarations were made.

 

57.

URGENT CARE/A&E AT UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS OF LEICESTER NHS TRUST

To receive presentations from the following organisations:-

 

Leicester City Clinical Commissioning Group

NHS England

University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust

Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust

East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust

Leicester City Council Social Care

Healthwatch Leicester

 

Each presentation will be a maximum of 10 minutes in duration.

 

The presentations will be followed by a discussion of the issues raised.

 

NOTE:   The meeting can be viewed live at the following link:

 

http://www.leicester.public-i.tv

 

An archive copy of the webcast meeting will also appear at the above link within 48 hours of the meeting.

Minutes:

Councillor Palmer welcomed everyone to the meeting and outlined the practicalities and consequences of the meeting being webcast.   He thanked everyone for attending at short notice to discuss the performance of the Urgent Care/A&E Department at the Leicester Royal Infirmary.

 

The aim of the meeting was to develop and revisit the Board’s understanding of the current situation around A&E.  It was important to review what had happened, what measures had been put in place and what ought to happen next.   There were increasing levels of public and media interest as well as public scrutiny of A&E performance and the Board had a key role to provide collective leadership in that process. 

 

Simon Freeman, as Chair of the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Urgent Care Working Group, provided a short overview as follows:- 

 

·         All partners recognised the issues associated with urgent care and were working hard to address them together. That meant doing more to keep patients well and out of hospital where possible, and making sure that first-class systems and processes were in place within the hospital and community hospitals to ensure that patients’ care could be transferred seamlessly to the most appropriate place for them.

 

·         Other contributors would provide examples of how the challenges were being met collectively, but a few of the highlights were:-

 

o   The implementation of a new A&E assessment system, which sees nearly a 30% of all patients arriving at A&E on foot, assessed and treated by nurses and GPs without the need for them to ever enter the main department. 

 

o   The launch of a team of rapid response GPs to treat elderly and vulnerable patients at home, and the trialling of putting GPs in rapid response cars with paramedics when responding to emergency calls.

 

·         All these were designed to help reduce the number of unnecessary visits to A&E, freeing up staff to focus on what they did best – caring for patients with the most urgent need.

 

·         UHL had also benefitted from significant additional funding during the winter to help improve the way in which the department and wider hospital operated. In particular it had focused on the flow from A&E to wards when patients need admitting, and improving discharge processes so that medically fit patients could be sent home earlier in the day so as to free up beds for other patients that needed them.   The effectiveness of this had been observed through the recent ‘Super Weekends’.  There was now a need to ensure that those lessons were put into practice on a daily basis.

 

Collectively these changes had provided some positive effect, but it was recognised that there was still a long way to go to get to where the service needed to be and everyone was collectively focused on that goal.   It was accepted that there would always be spikes in attendances on any particular day but the system needed to be able to cope with that appropriately.   The more pressing concern was ensuring  ...  view the full minutes text for item 57.

58.

CLOSE OF MEETING

Minutes:

The Chair declared the meeting closed at 5.30pm

Note:  This meeting was webcast live and can be viewed at the following link:-

 

http://www.leicester.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/129586