A “FLYING squad” of elderly care specialists will be parachuted in to the A&E department at Great Western Hospital.

The small team of geriatricians will include a doctor and up to six therapists.

They will be posted to the Great Western Hospital’s emergency department from December, tasked with assessing older people who arrive at the hospital.

Outlining the plans, Swindon Clinical Commissioning Group executive nurse Gill May said: “It means that, as an older person, you will have very quick access to a geriatrician and a range of therapists and nurses who will start to carry out very quickly what we call a comprehensive geriatric assessment.”

The crack team – labelled a flying squad by Gill – have been funded by money from the Bath, North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Sustainability Transformation Partnership.

The cash would also bring in similar teams at hospitals in Bath and Salisbury.

Gill, the most senior nurse at Swindon CCG, said that by assessing patients more quickly it would help ensure an older person is seen very differently and managed appropriately.

“Importantly, it will see whether an admission [to hospital] can be avoided – because often that isn’t the best thing,” she said.

Her comments came as she outlined a tough position for urgent care in Swindon.

She told a meeting of the NHS organisation’s governing body that she was reluctant to present a new strategy for urgent care in the town.

“Over the next few months we are going to have to rewrite the strategy that was presented to the governing body back in 2014,” she said.

“When I looked at the refreshed strategy, the amount of national guidance that is coming out at quite a pace from the Department of Health meant that at this point I didn’t feel that we could go so far as to give you a strategy.”

The most pressing concern was improving A&E performance at GWH, she said.

From next March, the Government is demanding that 95 per cent of patients are treated or admitted to hospital within four hours of arriving at A&E and other urgent treatment units.

In September, the latest month for which data is available, 87.3 per cent of patients were seen within the four-hour target.

In the A&E itself, just three quarters of patients were admitted or discharged within four hours.

The poor performance was blamed on bed blocking, preventing patients from being moved on to the wards.

Swindon CCG was working with its partners on ways to improve acute care in the town, Gill said.

It included improving the hospital’s urgent treatment centre, extending GP hours and working with Wiltshire CCG on ways for NHS 111 call handlers to book patients urgent care appointments.

She said: “We are doing this within the thick of winter and the current demand.”

However, CCG GP representative Dr Philip Mayes criticised plans for ignoring the needs of patients.

He said: “None of this talks about how people access services and how to tailor services to match people.

“It’s all about how we sift people to fit services. We keep looking at this the wrong way round.”

Gill said: “We didn’t want to go in to launch a new strategy, because a lot of this is being tested.

"We need to see what the learning is from that and how we modify it.”