Debate contribution: Excess Deaths Linked to Long Emergency Department Waits
Debate contribution by Mr Mike Nesbitt on .
- MLA
- Mr Mike Nesbitt
- Party at the time
- Ulster Unionist Party
- Date
- 20 April 2026
- Type
- Debate contribution (made as a minister)
- Business
- Question for Urgent Oral Answer
- Heading
- Excess Deaths Linked to Long Emergency Department Waits
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5493700
Read the official Assembly record
Text
There are several. When you factor in the number of people who visit those centres, that maybe talks to what Mrs Dodds referred to: the fact that the number of people presenting at EDs has not radically increased. One of the reasons for that has to be the fact that we are providing so many alternative pathways for them. Approximately 40 rapid-access clinics have been either established or enhanced across all the geographic trusts. The pathways offer around 100,000 appointments per annum, and those can all be scheduled. Therefore, they offer timely access to specialist opinion and investigation, and they are fundamental to providing ED alternatives, with referrals from GPs, Phone First and our urgent care centres. Urgent care centres offer treatment to patients with urgent medical conditions that are not immediately life-threatening but require face-to-face assessment and/or timely access to diagnostics within a 24-hour period. That is a viable alternative to ED attendance. In the absence of a physical structure that is capable of accommodating one or more urgent care services or streams, those are individually referred to as streams that sit within or alongside other units of our healthcare services. My Department has successfully commissioned urgent care centres and streams in all trust areas. We also have same-day emergency care, and we have a number of alternative pathways.
I am not sure that we should be posing an either/or question. Certainly, I am working within my brief and my responsibility, and, on health and social care, the buck stops with me. How you fashion the delivery and the improvements that are required depends on certain aspects that can be provided by the Executive, and one of them is budget. We are currently in a financial year, which started on 1 April, with us facing, by the current estimate, a shortfall of £760 million. Something that would be very important in EDs would be to increase the number of hours in the day when there are senior decision makers in the ED because that really helps, as we know from previous periods of industrial action. When you have senior decision makers making those decisions, that helps the flow in an ED. That is on me, but being able to afford to put in more senior decision makers depends on budget, and you can argue that that is on the Executive.
391 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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