logo
Birmingham chief medic explains cause of A&E waits as hospitals hit 'busiest' period

Birmingham chief medic explains cause of A&E waits as hospitals hit 'busiest' period

Yahoo18-04-2025

Birmingham's chief medic has lifted the lid on the "real pressures" facing A&E departments - and the cause of ambulance queues as city hospitals enter their "busiest period."
Prof Kiran Patel, chief medical officer at University Hospitals Birmingham Trust, told BirminghamLive that hospitals were busier than ever, with added pressure expected this Easter weekend.
The medic, who is part of a team overseeing daily clinical operations at the biggest hospitals in the West Midlands, also explained the cause of long delays in A&Es and lengthy handovers from ambulances.
READ MORE: Birmingham Airport Easter egg rules as passengers warned 'we might unwrap'
Get breaking news on BirminghamLive WhatsApp
Prof Patel, also a consultant cardiologist at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, said: "There's real pressure with ambulances arriving at A&E. This is the busiest time of the year for us".
Birmingham's A&E departments are based at the Queen Elizabeth, Heartlands Hospital and Good Hope hospitals.
There is also an urgent treatment centre at Solihull Hospital.
At the time of writing on April 17, the QE reported an A&E wait of nine hours and 44 minutes, Heartlands reported emergency department waits of four hours and 57 minutes and Good Hope had waits of just an hour and eight minutes.
"People naturally gravitate to where the light bulbs are on but if everyone does that, it makes it very difficult so we try to divert people to other services" said Prof Patel.
He spoke to BirminghamLive as emergency departments across Birmingham and the West Midlands braced for an exceptionally busy period. University Hospitals Birmingham is one of the largest NHS trusts in England, caring for more than 2.2 million patients each year.
"Everybody is triaged within 15 minutes - that way we can identify who is really sick" said Prof Patel.
"Things like heart attacks or major strokes will get quick treatment which is why waiting times are high for other patients."
In January, the UHB Trust declared a critical incident because of 'exceptional demand', revealing more than 300 patients had flu, with 13 in critical care with very serious complications.
While that critical incident is now over, Prof Patel said staff no longer referred to 'winter pressures' as they were year-round.
"If it's a general emergency, by all means dial 999 if it's critical" said Prof Patel ahead of the bank holiday weekend.
"Or dial 111 and they will give you good advice. If you can make your own way there, good, but, if not, call the call ambulance service."
He said pressure built on services as a result of issues like knife crime.
"We deal with the consequences of knife crime and sadly sometimes people die."
And he said knife crime was "not just a Birmingham problem" but explained: "For our staff this is quite traumatic to see and the fact it happens is sad to see.
"We need to know what our children are up to and take really good care for our family and friends."
He said A&E departments continued to see a spike in patients with respiratory illnesses, as well as falls, infections and heart attacks.
When higher numbers of patients present at major city A&E departments, access to treatment can get clogged, causing delays in ambulance handovers and log jams.
"The flow through the hospital and out of the other end is slow," said Prof Patel.
"We need to flow all the way from the front door to the back door. It is a continuous process and many things slow over the weekend.
"There is much that goes into community planning but the hospitals do get more congested and they are busier."
The Trust has urged Brummies to keep A&E departments free for serious emergencies over Easter and said pharmacies and NHS 111 can provide help without the need for a hospital visit.
"Make sure you look after yourself," said Prof Patel.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Medical equipment repair is a fast-growing healthcare career. The average salary is $65,000, and it doesn't require a 4-year degree.
Medical equipment repair is a fast-growing healthcare career. The average salary is $65,000, and it doesn't require a 4-year degree.

Business Insider

time20 hours ago

  • Business Insider

Medical equipment repair is a fast-growing healthcare career. The average salary is $65,000, and it doesn't require a 4-year degree.

Healthcare technology management, or HTM, is a growing field with promising career opportunities — but it's one that remains under the radar. It ranked 22nd in the US News & World Report's list of the 100 best jobs of 2025. And according to a report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs in medical equipment repair are expected to grow by 18% between 2023 and 2033 — a faster rate than average for all occupations. Several factors are driving this growth. Medical equipment repairers or biomedical equipment technicians are an increasingly vital part of the healthcare ecosystem. They maintain, calibrate, and repair everything from vital-sign monitors to MRIs. "You can't deliver healthcare without either a patient, a provider, or an instrument," Jinesh Patel, the founder and CEO of the medical equipment management company UptimeHealth, told Business Insider. "Without an X-ray, the radiologist isn't doing anything. Without a vitals monitor, the nurse can't tell you what's going on." The industry is also aging out faster than new BMETs can be trained. A survey from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation found that about a third of HTM professionals are over 55. "A large portion of our experienced workforce is reaching retirement age, leaving a significant talent gap across the country," said Kristi McDermott, the chief operating officer of the clinical asset management company Trimedx. She added that too few people know about the viability, or even existence, of this profession. "There's going to be a vacuum of knowledge very soon," said Patel, who added that he regularly struggles to find enough technicians for his hiring needs. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 7,300 openings for medical equipment repairers each year over the next decade; meanwhile, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation reports that BMET programs only graduate about 400 students a year. "This is a huge labor demand that isn't being met, and this is the time, in my opinion, for anyone to get involved," Patel told BI. BMET careers are accessible, well-paid, and meaningful While many other high-growth healthcare jobs require advanced degrees, medical equipment repair is a career you can start more quickly and affordably. Many technicians enter the field with just an associate degree, meaning they have relatively minimal college debt, and earn an average entry-level salary of about $65,000 a year. "That's a high ROI on day one," Richard Gonzales, the president of the College of Biomedical Equipment Technology, said. Some jobs require even less prior education and training, as some employers offer paid apprenticeships or on-the-job training to meet skyrocketing demand. Gonzales said that his college is constantly working with top-tier healthcare organizations to help technicians land jobs faster. "These organizations all want the same thing — to reduce the time it takes to establish minimum competency for an entry-level technician — and they're willing to put in the sweat equity to support that individual's career path," he explained. Many BMETs are also inspired by the ability to have a real-world impact on people's lives. "You are actually helping create access to healthcare. Every time you get a machine back up and running, a patient can be seen on that machine again," Patel said. "If you're interested in pursuing a career that has real meaning, just look at the patient connected to the device — you're making a difference," Gonzales said. He added that he sees a lot of veterans, like himself, pursue this as a second career for just that reason: "You served your country, now you can serve your community." A future-proof trade for a modern healthcare system Patel likened medical equipment repair to trade careers like plumbing and electrician work: The need for those jobs isn't going away anytime soon. "There's no world, at least that we can perceive, that equipment will not be used to help facilitate healthcare," he said. "It's almost a guaranteed profession." Gonzales said the opportunities for career growth are broad for technicians who are excited to continue learning. "When you think about innovation, medical device integration, cybersecurity, network medical devices, advances in patient care, and AI," he said, "somebody is either designing and creating these devices, installing them, hooking them to patients, or maintaining and repairing them." Patel added that the industry is ripe for new people to come in and help shape its future: "If people get excited about not just doing a job, but being the next wave of leaders and people who help take it to the next level, this is the place to do it."

OS Data From CARTITUDE-1: A Cure for Myeloma?
OS Data From CARTITUDE-1: A Cure for Myeloma?

Medscape

timea day ago

  • Medscape

OS Data From CARTITUDE-1: A Cure for Myeloma?

CHICAGO — The anticipated release of 5-year overall survival (OS) data from the CARTITUDE-1 trial showed that the use of ciltacabtagene autoleucel (cilta-cel) in patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (RRMM) met or exceeded expectations. 'We already knew from our initial publication that 98% of patients who got cilta-cel responded to therapy and that the majority of those responses were complete responses. We also knew that the median PFS [progression-free survival] was approximately 34 months, which is unheard of in this patient population,' said study author Peter Voorhees, MD, of Atrium Health/Levine Cancer Institute, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Charlotte, North Carolina, during an oral abstract session at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2025 annual meeting. 'Today we are sharing that the median OS is just over 5 years, and that one third of the study population has remained progression-free following a single cilta-cel infusion with no maintenance therapy.' These findings were simultaneously published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology . CARTITUDE-1 is a phase 1B/2 trial in which 97 patients with four or more prior lines of treatment for RRMM received cilta-cel. Of these patients, 45 are currently alive and in long-term follow-up in the CARTinue 15-year post-infusion study. This group is further broken down among 32 patients who have remained progression-free since their infusion and 13 patients who had progressive disease and are now in post-progressive disease follow-up. Of the progression-free patients, 12 from a single center with annual minimal residual disease (MRD) testing remain MRD-negative at year 5 or longer. Voorhees noted that long-term remissions were not limited to patients with standard-risk disease. 'Patients with high-risk cytogenetics like del17p, t(14;16) or t(4;14) and those with extramedullary plasmacytomas were equally likely to be progression-free,' he said. The study team also found that patients in long-term remission had more immune-fit drug products and higher effector to target ratios at peak expansion, Voorhees said. The discussant for this study, Krina K. Patel, MD, MSc, of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston told attendees that the CARTITUDE-1 OS data were 'phenomenal for these hard-to-treat patients' as she reshared Voorhees' PFS slide showing a plateau extending toward 78 months. 'I do hope this plateau continues forever for these 33% of patients, to the point where we can say it's a true cure,' Patel said. 'But I don't hold my breath because most of my patients do relapse at some point.' Patel also noted the limitation that CARTITUDE-1 is a single-arm study. 'We know there's CARTITUDE-4, so we have randomized data that shows better performance than at least a couple of our standard care options,' she said. 'But it is hard to compare historical controls.' Following this presentation, Voorhees sat down with Medscape Medical News . The following interview has been edited for clarity. Since FDA approval of cilta-cel was based on CARTITUDE-1, the expectation was that longer-term data would also be very good. Why are these long-term OS results from CARTITUDE-1 so important? The median overall survival wound up being just over 5 years, when we would have expected it to be 1 year in a similar population. One third of the patients are alive and in remission, and they've been off therapy for 5 years, which is something we've never seen before. Just as importantly, we're not seeing new safety signals, and the rates of high-grade infection seem to be declining further out from treatment, which is what we would expect with immune recovery. Is it time to start thinking of myeloma as a potentially curable disease? I'm always very cautious when I discuss that. Possibly there may be patients who never relapse, but I am curious to see how these next 5 years play out because if the majority of these patients remain in remission 10 years out from cilta-cel infusion, then I'll be using the word 'cure' less cautiously at that time. We do talk a lot about functional cures in multiple myeloma: For someone newly diagnosed with standard-risk disease, they will get a three or four drug induction therapy, then a transplant followed by maintenance therapy. A lot of these patients will stay in remission well beyond 10 years and they'll pass away at an older age of unrelated causes. What do the new CARTITUDE-1 data do to the paradigm of continuous therapy? The other thing that has made us hesitate about using the word 'cure' in myeloma is the traditional paradigm of continuous treatment. What happens to patients in remission when you stop therapy? Are they in a long-term remission because you're keeping the heat on the disease or are they cured and what you're applying to them continuously is unnecessary? What makes the cilta-cel 5-year data so compelling is that these patients got that single infusion and a third of them are still in remission 5 years later. Your ASCO presentation included a discussion of MRD level at 10−5 vs 10−6. Why is that important here? Currently the best that's available as far as regular clinical practice is concerned is a 10−6 but MRD negativity is often reported at 10−5. But as so many people going through CAR T-cell therapy achieve MRD negativity at 10−5, the 10−6 level of sensitivity seems to be a better way of distinguishing those patients that might be at higher risk for disease progression vs those that are not. You're going to see us transitioning more toward using MRD negativity at 10−6 for our clinical trials going forward. What's ahead for the CARTITUDE research program? The expectation is the earlier you use a highly effective therapy, the better it's going to perform. We have the CARTITUDE-4 study, which compares cilta-cel with standard of care in both standard-risk and high-risk disease. CARTITUDE-5 and CARTITUDE-6 are both phase 3 studies looking at the application of cilta-cel therapy for newly diagnosed myeloma patients. For CARTITUDE-5, we're looking to see if adding cilta-cel after lenalidomide, bortezomib and dexamethasone will improve outcomes for patients not eligible to receive an upfront transplant. And in CARTITUDE-6, we're looking to see if cilta-cel can be used instead of autologous stem cell transplantation as consolidation for younger, fitter patients with newly diagnosed myeloma. And if things go the way we expect them to, we may be starting to use that word cure more often. When did it really hit you that the cilta-cel data are better than anything else that has yet happened? We've got several patients from CARTITUDE-1 at our institution who are still in complete remission, and they've lived a normal life for years now. We have patients on the CARTITUDE-2 program who are also long-term responders, so we see this in our everyday practice more and more. If you had told me 10 years ago that this is what we would be doing, I would've thought there's no way. But here we are doing it. This study was funded by Johson & Johnson and Legend Biotech. Voorhees disclosed having relationships with Abbvie/Genentech, Ascentage Pharma, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Indapta Therapeutics, Janssen, Kite (a Gilead company), Nektar, Pfizer, Regeneron, Sanofi, and TeneoBio. Patel reported ties with Abbvie, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, Janssen, Legend Biotech, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Regeneron, and Takeda.

Bonum Therapeutics to Participate in Panel on Conditionally Active Biologics at BIO 2025
Bonum Therapeutics to Participate in Panel on Conditionally Active Biologics at BIO 2025

Business Wire

time2 days ago

  • Business Wire

Bonum Therapeutics to Participate in Panel on Conditionally Active Biologics at BIO 2025

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bonum Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that is using innovative technology for conditional regulation to create highly active and less toxic medicines, today announced Chief Business Officer Neela Patel, Ph.D., will speak at BIO 2025 on a panel on ' Beyond Bispecifics and ADCs: Conditionally Active Biologics.' Chief Business Officer Neela Patel, Ph.D., will discuss the promise and challenges of these next-generation drugs. The panel will be held on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, in Room 206AB from 10:15 to 11:15 a.m. ET during the BIO International Convention, which takes place June 16-19, at the Boston International Convention and Exhibition Center. It is open to all registered attendees. Conditionally active biologics (CABs) are an emerging class of drugs that are safer and more efficacious than existing treatments with the potential to overcome the challenges of current state-of-the-art therapies, including ADCs and bispecifics. While companies working in this field are currently focused on oncology and immunology, many of their technologies can be applied to any protein therapeutic where regulation is required to harness a biology for patient benefit. The moderator-led discussion will explore the scientific and commercial landscape for CABs, including types of conditionally active therapeutic modalities currently in research and development, the status of clinical data for these molecules, recent technological advances, and the current and future environment for financings and deals. Patel is a scientist and business development executive with more than 25 years of leadership in drug discovery and development, project and portfolio management, and pipeline development through external innovation. Prior to joining Bonum in 2022, she was part of the executive team at Good Therapeutics, where, as Chief Business Development Officer she co-led the company's acquisition by Roche and the subsequent spinout of Bonum. She will be joined by four panelists representing different perspectives on the technology's potential and challenges, including an investor, an expert in drug development from pharma and scientist executives from biotechnology companies with technologies for regulating biologic therapeutics. Alexandra Cantley, Ph.D., Partner, Polaris Partners Stephen Demerast, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, Tentarix Biotherapeutics Randi Isaacs, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Werewolf Therapeutics John C. Lin, MD, Ph.D., SVP, Immuno-Oncology, Head of Bispecifics R&D, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Moderator: Michael C. Rice, MS, MBA, SVP, Advanced Therapeutics, Lumanity About Bonum Therapeutics Bonum Therapeutics is a privately held biotechnology company that uses a novel antibody-based mechanism to create regulated and targeted, highly active, and less toxic medicines. Bonum's most advanced program is in preclinical development. The company was founded in 2022 as a spinout of Good Therapeutics, following the sale of Good to Roche in September 2022 for $250 million, plus milestones. Bonum's unique approach takes advantage of the ability of an antibody to bind specifically and competitively to two distinct antigens – a dual-binding antibody (DBA). The technology brings the power and specificity of an antibody to therapeutic control and is applicable to a wide range of therapeutic areas, including oncology, autoimmunity, metabolic disorders, and pain management. The company is backed by a group of leading venture investors including Rivervest Venture Partners, Roche Venture Fund, Digitalis Ventures, American Century Investments, Codon Capital, and Vivo Capital. For more information, please visit our website at and connect with us on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store