Meetings have been held to try and combat the rapidly increasing use of emergency care services in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

More than 100 healthcare professionals and specialists met to help develop an improved way of delivering urgent and emergency care.

The two-day event, which took place at Ashton Court Stadium, Bristol, allowed experts to work together on re-designing services such as A&E, NHS 111 and GP out-of-hours to manage the ever increasing demand.

Kiaran Flanagan, consultant in acute medicine and divisional clinical director for medicine at North Bristol NHS Trust, said: “In recent years we have seen demand for urgent and emergency care services rapidly increase in our area.

"Surprisingly we are particularly seeing a surge in people aged between 20 and 40 accessing urgent care.

"I know from my role at NBT that this puts enormous pressure on our Emergency Department and we need to do things differently to maintain safe, high quality services for our patients."

Peter Brindle, GP and medical director at Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group, said: “This event has allowed us to harness the skills and experience of around 100 local nurses, doctors, pharmacists, paramedics, finance specialists and operational leads.

Plans developed during the event will now be implemented over the coming year to improve urgent care responses in winter 2019.

For more information about the emergency care services available in your area go to: bnssgccg.nhs.uk/health-services.