Sir Jim Mackey<\/a>, the head of NHS England, said the rollout was part of efforts to bring \u201corder\u201d to emergency care, prioritising the most urgent cases and sending others elsewhere.<\/p>\nUnder the system, which hospitals are being urged to introduce by winter, patients arriving at A&E will answer questions about symptoms and medical history on self-check-in screens or tablets.<\/p>\n
While some patients will be prioritised for immediate treatment, others will be redirected to pharmacies or GPs, or given appointments to return later.<\/p>\n
Emergency cases arriving by ambulance or requiring immediate life-saving care would bypass the system and receive urgent clinical treatment, health officials said.<\/p>\n
Sir Jim urged health service leaders to rapidly adopt the \u201cdigital triage\u201d system developed by NHS England.<\/p>\n
In a speech to the NHS ConfedExpo conference in Manchester, Sir Jim said it was his \u201cpersonal obsession\u201d to bring \u201corder\u201d into urgent and emergency care, reducing long waits and overcrowding.<\/p>\n
However, patients\u2019 groups raised fears of a \u201ccomputer says no\u201d approach to emergency medicine, warning vulnerable patients could struggle with digital screening and be incorrectly diverted away from A&E.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe big prize for this coming winter is shifting to introducing many more appointments into urgent care,\u201d Sir Jim said, adding that the combination of this with digital triage could have an \u201cenormous\u201d impact on patients in the coming months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Accident & Emergency (A&E) patients will be forced to complete online questionnaires before getting treatment under NHS plans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":472212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[238509,134,527,238510,111,43,139,229961,69,238508,1177,1252],"class_list":["post-472211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-aampe","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-live-priority","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nhs-national-health-service","tag-nz","tag-sir-jim-mackey","tag-standard","tag-uk-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/472212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}