Acute Medicine - What's the Problem?

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There is pressure at every point of the system. People need urgent, an emergency care by definition, quickly. And more and more they ain't getting it. What's really particularly troubling me in these days is that the evidence of actual patient harm as a direct result of this is starting to pile up. The eneges is in a really gravean really perilous state. We now have the royal college of emergency medicine, which represents a and e doctors across the u k,. They estimate there are 500 excess deaths a week - mainly attributable to many delays across the system.

The UK’s new health secretary, Thérèse Coffey, has not taken on an easy job. Almost two-thirds of trainee GPs plan to work part-time just a year after they qualify, reporting that the job has become too intense to safely work more. A record 6.8 million people are waiting for hospital treatment in England, and 132,139 posts lie vacant across the NHS in England. Ian Sample hears from acute medicine consultant Dr Tim Cooksley about what’s happening within the NHS, and speaks to the Guardian’s health policy editor, Denis Campbell, about how the UK’s health and social care systems ended up in crisis and whether they can be fixed. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod