Aiming to reduce emergency admissions

The ‘Reducing Emergency Admissions’ report1 by the NAO’s Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), Sir Amyas Morse KCB, states that over the last four years, the NHS has done well to manage the impact on hospitals, despite admitting more people as emergency admissions. However, while progress has been made in some areas, the report highlights the challenges of managing emergency admissions, which are deemed ‘far from being under control’. 

The National Audit Office scrutinises public spending for Parliament and is independent of government. Sir Amyas Morse KCB, an Officer of the House of Commons who leads the NAO, certifies the accounts of all government departments and many other public sector bodies. He has statutory authority to examine and report to Parliament on whether departments and the bodies they fund, nationally and locally, have used their resources efficiently, effectively, and with economy.

The C&AG does this through a range of outputs including: value for money reports on matters of public interest; investigations to establish the underlying facts in circumstances where concerns have been raised by others or observed through the NAO’s wider work; landscape reviews to aid transparency and good practice guides. The work is designed to ensure that those responsible for the use of public money are held to account and to help government to improve public services, leading to audited savings of £734 million in 2016.