Chris Roseveare is a Consultant Physician in Acute Medicine at University Hospitals Southamption, and is Editor of Acute Medicine Journal. He tweets at @CRoseveare. Here he discusses a recent report from Sky News: Hundreds Discharged From Hospitals Every Night

news.sky.com
It’s 2am on a Sunday in a hospital in the UK, and the duty consultant physician has just been called in. It has been a difficult weekend for the medical team: the Acute Medical Unit (AMU) was already full on Saturday morning following a busy Friday night. Compounding this, the locum agency were unable to fill the SHO vacancy on Saturday and the foundation year 1 called in sick for her night shift. Sunday had started with 15 medical patients waiting to be clerked in the Emergency Department (ED), and the medical team have struggled all day to clear the backlog. Ambulance trolleys are now queued in the corridor in the ED; there are ten patients who have waited more than four hours for a bed in the AMU, two of whom are approaching a twelve hour wait. Beds have been opened – and filled – in the managed care unit as well as the medical ambulatory care area. More than 20 patients have been ‘outlied’ into the surgical division during the course of the weekend, which has necessitated cancellation of a number of elective surgical admissions planned for surgery tomorrow. There no longer seems to be any room for manoeuvre.
In consultation with the on-call executive, the duty manager now has a plan: several patients have been identified across the hospital whose discharge is planned for Monday morning – perhaps if they could be discharged from hospital overnight this could help ease the pressure in the ED….? The medical consultant is on her way into the hospital. This will be a difficult discussion.
A recent report on Sky News suggested that ‘over 300,000 patients’ had been discharged from hospital overnight since 2012, including over 60,000 who were over 75. Continue reading →