Commenting on a position paper from the British Medical Association (BMA) on 7 day service, Royal College of Physicians (RCP) president, Sir Richard Thompson, said:
I welcome the BMA’s recognition that patients deserve the same high quality care in the evening and weekends as they receive during the week. We agree with the BMA that the priority should be to introduce a 7 day service for acute and emergency care, in line with the RCP’s original recommendation from 2010, and the recent report of our Future Hospital Commission. Support services will also need to cover nights and weekends to make extended working successful.
Doctors, particularly medical registrars, are already under increasing pressure in the NHS, and many junior doctors are reluctant to take up these hard-pressed posts. Any changes needed to implement 7 day working must also improve working conditions for acute medical staff so that we can encourage doctors to take up these posts and continue to provide high quality services.
The RCP has produced a series of Acute Care Toolkits to support and improve the working lives of staff on acute medical units, and we look forward to working with the BMA on these issues.
In December 2010 RCP president Sir Richard Thompson said ‘patients are still not getting the care they deserve at night and at weekends. Too many junior doctors are covering too many very ill patients, and this has to change.’
The RCP also recommended for the first time that any hospital admitting acutely ill patients should have a consultant physician on-site for at least 12 hours per day, 7 days a week, who should have no other duties scheduled during this time. All medical wards should have a daily visit from a consultant; in most hospitals this will involve more than one physician.
Read the 2010 RCP position statement
In October 2012 the RCP produced an acute care toolkit in association with the Society of Acute Medicine on how to deliver a 12 hour, 7 day consultant presence on the acute medical unit, with recommendations on minimum staffing numbers of AMU consultants, their core duties, how to design rotas and how overnight cover should be provided.
The RCP’s Future Hospital Commission report, Future Hospital: caring for medical patients, recommended a radical restructuring of the wards where acutely ill patients are treated, and a new organisational and management structure whose responsibilities for acutely ill medical patients will stretch out from the hospital into the wider community, developing the idea of a local healthcare system.
Find out more about the Future Hospital Programme
For further information, please contact Linda Cuthbertson, head of PR, on +44 (0)203 075 1254 / 0774 877 7919, or email Linda.Cuthbertson@rcplondon.ac.uk