But while hospital beds clog up with thousands of patients who cannot be discharged for lack of services to support them, and the queues for beds back up into Emergency Departments, NHS England has resorted to desperate tactics in their efforts to force an apparent improvement in A&E performance.
The HSJ revealed that on the last day of February trust CEOs and chief operating officers were instructed to sign declarations that their hospitals would meet the target of seeing and treating 76% of A&E patients within 4 hours during March.
It was already nigh on impossible for this to happen, given that only 13 trusts in England had met this target in January, and almost all major targets have been missed for the whole of 2023/24. Definitions of bullying include setting unreasonable or impossible deadlines and setting unmanageable workloads.
The HSJ further reveals that to add further pressure trust bosses were required to give the direct phone numbers and emails of the senior officers responsible for performance. This would facilitate more NHS England bullying.
Full story in The Lowdown, 1 April 2024