At yesterday’s No10 coronavirus press conference, NHS national medical director, Professor Stephen Powis, revealed that the latest figures from Public Health England suggest that A&E attendances for cardiac and coronary conditions have recovered to normal levels, after significantly falling in late March and early April.
This increase follows the launch of the Help Us Help You campaign on the 25 April by NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens, which aims to encourage those who need urgent and emergency medical care to come forward for it as they normally would.
Professor Powis said: “NHS staff have been working around the clock to respond to the coronavirus pandemic while at the same time ensuring that essential and urgent services – such as A&Es and specialist care for stroke and heart attacks – continue in as safe a way as possible.
“But we have been really concerned that a combination of worries about the virus, and not wanting to be a burden on NHS staff, has meant that some people haven’t come forward for care for themselves or their families when they would usually have done so – and we saw that in the record low number of A&E attendances last month.
“The majority of the reduced attendances were for lower risk conditions, so for example sprains were down by 80%, for alcohol intoxication by just under 60%, and finger wounds down by just under 50%. But we are also worried that within that reduction in attendances were people who should have come to A&E, and whose health might be put at risk by not doing so.
“But encouragingly the latest data suggests that since we launched our Help Us Help You campaign the number of people attending with symptoms of heart attacks for instance has increased back to levels we would expect ordinarily.
“This doesn’t mean more people are having these problems; it means that the 50% drop in people seeking help is now gone back to normal in the past month.
“And it shows that the message we’ve been getting out – use the NHS as normal when you need it – is being heard.
“But there is no room for complacency, and so we will continue to remind you that the NHS is there for you when you need it – expectant mums worried about the movement of their baby, anyone experiencing symptoms of a stroke, or parents of children with emergency asthma attacks – while at the same time we hospitals have in place infection control methods in their A&Es and acute wards that ensure that everybody can be treated safely.”
