Video: Campaign highlights incorrect usage of A&E

Choose Well - Women waiting for treatment for hair-dye disasters and botched false nails

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A series of videos are headlining an NHS campaign highlighting some of the most incorrect reasons for patients attending A&E.

Actors from stage and screen gave up their time free of charge to appear alongside NHS staff as characters including women waiting for treatment for hair-dye disasters and botched false nails, a pushy mum desperate for her son to be seen by senior doctors for his diarrhoea, and even a man hoping A&E staff will turn their hands to helping out his poorly dog.

The more serious message is that cases such as these put added pressure on already busy A&E and 999 teams.

In the North West alone, more than 400,000 people who could have been treated and advised by their local pharmacist or GP, or could have looked after themselves at home, went to A&E departments in the last 12 months.

Focussing on patients in the waiting rooms, the viewer can’t tell until the end of the films whether they’re in a vet’s surgery, X-factor audition, beauty salon – or a hospital. At the end of each, viewers are reminded that they should go to their local pharmacy for advice on treatment of very minor illnesses and injuries.

The videos are being distributed through social media, and also distributed for display at leading supermarket and pharmacy chains as part of the NHS’s annual “Choose Well” campaign. They have been launched to coincide with national Ask Your Pharmacist Week.

Every attendance at A&E in the UK costs a minimum of £59, and as many as one in four people who attend A&E could have been treated by their pharmacist or GP, or did not need any form of medical intervention.

In the North West, this cost £20.9 million in the last year. Replicated across England, NHS North West economists say this equates to a cost of between £80 million and £100 million. Studies by other organisations have estimated even higher costs.