Local medical emergency units: Learning Set interim report

The UK supports around 225-250 District General Hospitals with ‘traditional’ planning populations of around 250,000. In 1997 the BMA published a paper suggesting that 400,000 population might be the right planning assumption for the future.

In such a scenario perhaps 100 communities with current DGHs would be drawn into discussions about the future of their acute hospitals. The Learning Set, formed in 1990, set out to examine and test the proposition: ‘can undifferentiated medical emergencies be managed at local level?’. This is their interim report, edited by Durrow.