COMMENT: Please keep on accessing the care that you need

Remember the days not so long ago when staff at hospitals' Accident and Emergency departments were being run off their feet with long queues of patients waiting to be seen?

How times have changed. Today we report how numbers going to A&E at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham have dropped by nearly a quarter compared with last year.

In March 2019, there were 13,098 attendances - but only 10,122 patients were seen last month.

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The story is the same at Southampton General Hospital, which has seen an even bigger drop of 33 per cent.

They mirror what's happening in A&Es across England, with attendances overall down by nearly a third in March and NHS England expecting there to be one million fewer patients this April than last – a drop of around half.

So what is going on? Does it show that people who should be going to hospital for treatment are being put off by fears of contracting coronavirus as frontline NHS staff in hospital battle the pandemic?

Or maybe people think that by going to hospital they would be a burden on a system dealing with an influx of Covid-19 patients.

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If that is the case, then there is a very real concern that people are putting themselves at risk of medical problems now and in the future.

NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens has urged people who have the symptoms of a heart attack or stroke, those who may be worried about a child or have concerns about conditions such as cancer to seek help as they always would have done.

A new public information campaign is now being rolled out to persuade people to seek help if they need it.

We would certainly echo that. Don’t put off going if it is necessary to do so. Keep on accessing the care you need - when you need it.

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