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Emergency care improving at West Suffolk Hospital
The West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust is improving its emergency care provision as evidenced by better performance in the national 4-hour urgent and emergency care standard, and positive findings from the urgent and emergency care survey 2024.
Achieving 88.4% in March for the 4-hour standard, a metric by which all trusts with urgent and emergency care (UEC) services are measured, services should either admit or discharge patients who attend an emergency department within four hours. With a national target of 76% in 2024/25, increasing to 78% for 2025/26, the Trust’s latest performance ranked it as the highest performing trust in the east of England, and fourth nationally.
Over the winter period from 2024 into 2025, the Trust has been working incredibly hard to improve its UEC performance against the 4-hour target, rising steadily from 62.1% in December 2024, to 63.4% in January 2025 and 67.1% in February 2025 – which is always the busiest time of year. This means patients are getting the care they need more quickly, reducing long waits in the emergency department and improving patient satisfaction.
Dr Richard Goodwin, medical director for the Trust, said: “I am very grateful to our teams involved in providing urgent and emergency care to our patients for their hard work and dedication to provide a significantly improved experience for our patients, their families and for our staff themselves. While improvements in our UEC services show solid progress, we need to maintain our focus to ensure our patients – particularly during the more challenging periods – receive the care they need as quicky as possible.
The Trust has also performed well in the urgent and emergency care survey 2024, with improvements in numerous areas ranking it ninth out of 120 type 1 trusts – those with emergency departments – in England.
Each year, the Care Quality Commission collects feedback from hospital patients accessing UEC services, such as emergency departments or urgent treatment centres, about the quality of the care they receive. The findings highlight the Trust’s commitment to improving its services and ensuring that patients receive the standard of care they deserve – despite the pressure these services are under.
In no areas did the Trust score worse than expected, and in many areas the Trust scored ‘somewhat better’, ‘better’ or ‘much better’ than expected.
The Trust scored highest in: the communication its staff provide to patients about their journey (9.7 out of 10); their condition and treatment (8.3 out of 10) and how clearly this was outlined (8.3 out of 10); involving patients in decisions on their treatment available to them (8.3 out of 10); the amount of time staff spent with patients (8.3 out of 10); and their overall experience whilst in the emergency department (8.1 out of 10).
Dr Ravi Ayyamuthu, emergency department consultant and deputy medical director for the Trust, said: “These results show that the experience of receiving the care our colleagues provide to those who need us most is high quality. While some of our patients' experience waits longer than we would like, please know that when we see you, we will always do our utmost to help you and provide the standard of care you deserve.”
Since the 2023 survey, the Trust has worked hard to improve its UEC services, building on feedback received. One area highlighted by patients for improvement was a need for more understandable information about how to care for their condition at home, and who to contact if they experience concerns about their condition following discharge.
Steps taken to improve this include an updated ‘what to do at home’ leaflet provided to patients which covers a greater range of conditions. The Trust has seen a marked improvement in scores for this area, evident in the results shown from the survey question ‘From the information you were given by hospital staff, did you feel able to care for your condition at home?’ which increased from a score of 7.5 out of 10 in 2023 to 9 out of 10 in 2024.
Additionally, the Trust improved its score in its staff discussing any further health or social care requirements after leaving the emergency department, going from 7.3 to 7.8 out of 10.
The results come after the CQC’s NHS Adult Inpatient Survey 2023, where the Trust placed fifth nationally out of all combined and acute trusts.
This year’s annual CQC urgent and emergency care survey is open now.
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