Trick or TREAT — admission avoidance for the over-70s

Lay summary

"Trick or TREAT" is a 2013 lay-language blog post Dr Wright wrote for the British Geriatrics Society describing what the TREAT (Triage and Rapid Elderly Assessment Team) service did for older patients arriving at A&E. Written shortly before the formal evaluation was published in Age & Ageing, it explained TREAT to a wider clinical audience: GPs, community nurses, therapy teams, and the geriatricians who would later set up similar services at their own hospitals.

The piece argued — at a time when policy debate around "frequent flyer" admissions was loud — that the question was not whether older patients in A&E were being managed too cautiously, but whether the system was set up to take a geriatrician's expertise seriously at the point of triage. TREAT was one answer to that.

The original BGS WordPress URL stopped serving content after the BGS migrated to Drupal in 2018, so the piece survives only via the Wayback Machine. It is referenced in the Age & Ageing paper and was cited in coverage by New Scientist ("Solving an age-old problem", Linda Geddes, August 2013) — both have informed how other NHS Trusts have designed their own admission-avoidance services.