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SCOTLAND’s health service needs urgent action to ease the “overwhelming” strain on A&E departments, the College of Emergency Medicine warned yesterday.
It called for a raft of reforms to handle rising patient numbers, made difficult by “inadequate” hiring and retention of skilled staff.
College president Dr Clifford Mann said it had repeatedly warned Holyrood about the “extreme pressure” which creates “sometimes overwhelming challenges for those working in these departments.”
The College called for measures from adjusting contracts to reflect “after-hours” and weekend work to sharing work with other agencies and alternative services for patients without acute illness or injury.
It follows an Audit Scotland report earlier this month which found more than 100,000 A&E visitors had to wait in triage for more than four hours last year.
