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Christmas and New Year festivities notoriously result in increased attendance at emergency departments (EDs). The knock-on effect of this in Solihull, in the West Midlands, is that, when ambulance staff and police accompany patients to hospital, the locality is temporarily under-resourced by these services. To address this problem, a collaborative project was implemented to enable advanced clinical practitioners, with consultant support, to assess, treat and potentially discharge patients from a specially constructed emergency facility situated in Solihull town centre. This has reduced the number of ED admissions and transfers, and resulted in significant cost and time savings for the ambulance service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "ECA Rejects Plans to Abolish Four-Hour Service Standard," by N. Lipley in the 2010 issue.

This article describes the aetiology of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome and discusses the benefits and disadvantages of some of the available cardioversion medications with which it can be treated.