Changes to A&E Entrance

Weston Area Health NHS Trust has been awarded £842,000 from NHS England (NHSE) to introduce primary care streaming – this money has been allocated for building work only to help redesign the front door to fully enable primary care streaming to have the maximum impact.  Primary care streaming is a patient pathway within urgent care whereby patients who self-present to the Emergency Department (ED) and have needs that can be best met by a GP/primary care service, are seen accordingly and thus enable the ED staff to care for those patients who need their acute assessment and treatment skills.

Primary care streaming will be achieved by the implementation of a GP and Advanced Nurse Practitioner (ANP) working within the ED footprint to see and treat the appropriate walk in patients. This achieves multiple points of access for WAHT patients, they will be in front of the correct care provider earlier in their journey.  There will be extensive building works to be completed which are as follows:

Emergency Department entrance work to commence 30^th October 2017 for a period of six weeks to improve the patient journey by:

• Creating a larger inner lobby
• Improved and relocated reception area for safe patient observation
• Direct access to Primary Care within the Emergency Department
• Introduction of a navigation room adjacent to ED reception for patients to be assessed and safely streamed to the appropriate care provider/pathway

From the 30^th October all ED attendances will need to present to the hospital main entrance and follow the pop up banners along the main hospital street to the temporary ED reception/waiting area within AEC/Outpatients.  There they will be booked in and triaged as normal.  To exit they will need to use the hospital main street and out through the main hospital front entrance.