Tackling the accident and emergency challenge

Management consultants are fond of the phrase “boiling the ocean”. People who are guilty of ocean boiling are those who take on a task that can’t realistically be accomplished because it’s so huge.

Better, management consultants say, to take a single cup of water at a time and boil that. Then, you can see how the ocean might one day be boiled.

Accident and emergency is one of healthcare’s oceans. The task of managing an increasing number of patients safely and efficiently against a background of limited resources is fiendishly complex.

Consultant Connect’s approach of giving GPs immediate telephone access to local hospital clinicians helps make sure that patients get the right treatment faster

Do the patients coming in need to be seen in hospital? Do you have the right physical premises and facilities to deal with them? Are your systems helping enough? Do you have the right people and enough of them?

The answer to all of these questions is probably “no”. So, what can you do? You can start boiling cups of ocean, breaking down the challenge into manageable chunks and tackling them one at a time.

Consultant Connect is one such chunk. Our approach of giving GPs immediate telephone access to local hospital clinicians helps make sure that patients get the right treatment faster, often without needing to go to hospital.

It addresses one part of the challenge – making sure the patients coming in need to be seen in hospital – but it isn’t an answer on its own. High performing hospitals, like Luton and Dunstable, recognise the need to boil lots of cups of ocean.