Missing: Outlying medical patients. If found please bleep the medics

The Society for Acute Medicine has recently updated its third Clinical Quality Improvement (CQI) standard, which states that, ‘All patients should be reviewed by the admitting consultant physician or an appropriate specialty consultant physician within 12 hours of arrival to hospital’.1 This is in line with NHS Improvement which recommends that all patients should receive a ‘consultant approved care plan’ within 12 hours of admission.2 This CQI is subsequently used as a benchmarking tool during the annual Society of Acute Medicine Benchmarking Audit (SAMBA). In the 2018 benchmarking audit, overall 62.8% of all patients received a consultant review within this time period.1 Within Aneurin Bevan University Health Board the statistics for time between patient admission and consultant post-take ward round (PTWR) are in line with national average. However, medical patients are still missed off PTWR due to a number of identified factors including: