Minor complaints mean headache for city A&Es
MORE than a dozen people went to A&E in the West Midlands with a blocked nose last year, new NHS statistics have revealed.
The data, which covers April to November 2017, lists at least 15 visits to emergency rooms across the region with this complaint.
They were among thousands of incidents of people going to A&E in the West Midlands with potentially trivial problems.
These also included at least 720 headaches, 293 sore throats and 169 coughs.
It is the first time the NHS has released figures of this kind, which provide analysis of A&E visits to NHS hospital trusts, broken down by chief complaint.
Not all trusts provided data, meaning the figures are incomplete – only four out of seven hospital trusts in the West Midlands are represented.
It means the number of people actually going to the hospitals across the region for minor problems is most likely far higher.
While in some instances these complaints can be quite debilitating or the symptom of a more serious problem, in most cases someone with a headache, a blocked nose or a sore throat should be visiting their GP rather than going to A&E.
However experts pointed out that people going to the hospital with minor complaints were not the main source of pressure on A&E departments.
Dr Adrian Boyle, chair the quality emergency care committee at the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: “The number of patients presenting to the emergency department with these complaints is relatively low and crucially these patients are less time consuming to treat and do not require admission.
“Many of these patients have responsibly tried to seek medical care outside the emergency department before arrival, either by seeing their GP or phoning NHS 111.
“The real pressure on our emergency departments comes from the increasing number of patients with multiple and complex problems – patients who need to be admitted urgently but very often face long waits due to inadequate bed numbers.”
Across hospitals in England, more than 272,000 people were left waiting in A&E for more than four hours in February – 15 per cent of attendances.