Acute medicine needs to be available 365 days a year

EDITOR—The inexorable rise in medical admissions in the United Kingdom is well documented if poorly understood.1 The increased activity has produced inevitable stresses at a time when bed numbers have fallen, the hours of work for doctors in training are being reduced, and the importance of formalised education in addition to experiential training is being increasingly recognised. 2 3

The working practices of doctors and nurses in many acute units are changing radically in an …