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Emergency Care

I am grateful for that intervention; I should have mentioned NHS Direct, which I will get out of the way now. There have been many criticisms of NHS Direct; perhaps I inadvertently forgot to mention it because I have not been very impressed by it. According to reports, it refers on many more cases than it solves. The next thing that I want to plug, and I have done so before, is an effective, excellent trialled triage system that is ready and waiting to be taken up. The Department of Health initiative, NHS pathways, offers a high-class computer software system for triaging. Work on the initiative has been going on a long time, but announcements on its progress seem to have disappeared. Nearly two years ago, the North East Ambulance Trust conducted a successful trial of the system. Like most hon. Members, I browse on Google a good bit of the time; googling ““NHS pathways”” tells me that it has won awards—a FileMaker Cube award in 2008 and the British Telecom e-health insider award as the health care IM & T team of the year for 2008. The chair of the independent panel judging for that latter award said that NHS pathways was ““an impressive piece of software”” that was already delivering ““gains”” where it was in use. He added:"““Getting patients to the right place in these circumstances saves lives and stops precious resources being misdirected.””" Given those accolades, NHS pathways must surely be made available across the NHS. I feel that NHS Direct should be just for information about illnesses and diseases, and should not involve the triage system and access. NHS pathways not only gives a person advice on where to go with their problem but makes the arrangements, but it must be integrated with ambulance services, out-of-hours providers, NHS Direct and other organisations. The hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, mentioned ambulance response times. Most people are aware of category A, which refers to top-priority cases—75 per cent. of which are supposed to be reached within eight minutes. I do not think that the other categories are sufficiently well known. Another tragedy in my area is under investigation at the moment. It appears that an out-of-hours GP did not assign sufficient urgency to a request, so the ambulance was delayed, with desperate results. Ambulance prioritisation categories need to be widely known. Staff at accident and emergency departments have been praised a lot today, and I fully echo that because I know how hard they work. However, my main concerns are to get those who do not have an A and E department to the right place at the right time, to prevent them from being taken unnecessarily to such departments and to plug the three-digit number and NHS pathways. If those things could be achieved, tragedies such as the one that happened to the little boy in my area would be much less likely. That little boy's parents would really appreciate such a memorial; they might almost feel that some good had come out of their tragedy.