Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to share best practice in providing triage services for patients among hospital trusts.

NHS Improvement, working with NHS England and key stakeholders, have produced a series of publications and learning events supporting trusts to ensure good patient flow in acute care. This includes ‘Good Practice Guide: Focus on Improving Patient Flow’¹ and a series of national conferences on patient flow and streaming delivered by Emergency Care Improvement Partnership.

NHS England and NHS Improvement are also jointly leading work to ensure that patients are appropriately triaged at their first point of contact with the National Health Service to ensure that they are treated in the most appropriate healthcare setting. This includes primary care streaming for people attending accident and emergency and triage services for patients being referred by their general practitioner for planned hospital care where there are community health services available to provide their treatment.

Note:

¹https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/good-practice-guide-focus-on-improving-patient-flow/