Urgent and Emergency Care Recovery Plan

Baroness Keeley Excerpts

Monday 30th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

I am happy to give my right hon. Friend that assurance. I assure the House that our commitment to the cancer mission and the dementia mission through the Office for Life Sciences is absolutely there. He is right that we are bringing that together in one paper—I think we should take a holistic approach—but I share his ambition on prevention. In early January, I set out a three-phased approach: first, the £250 million immediate response to the pressures we saw from the flu spike over Christmas; secondly, as I announced today, building greater resilience into the system looking ahead to next winter; and thirdly, the major conditions paper on prevention, which is about bringing forward the innovative work that colleagues are doing through the Office for Life Sciences to impact the NHS frontline much sooner than might otherwise have been the case.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I want to raise the case of a constituent who described to me the state of Salford Royal’s A&E earlier in January, saying:

“My partner was taken by ambulance yesterday at about 11am. He has a severe chest infection and breathing problems. He was left sitting in a chair on oxygen until 10pm when a trolley was found for him to sleep on. There are no beds available.”

My constituent said that patients and staff

“feel that no one cares”.

After such a long wait, my constituent’s partner was found to have pneumonia and he has been very poorly. Now the Secretary of State is talking about a target of 76% of A&E patients being seen within four hours by next March. Will he tell me and my constituent why he thinks it is acceptable for patients to wait longer than is safe?

[Steve Barclay]

We are bringing times down; I think the current mean response for C2s is much more in the region of 25 or 26 minutes than it was in late December-early January, because across the UK there was a massive spike in flu. The hon. Lady will have seen exactly the same in the Labour-run NHS in Wales. Over December there was a 20% increase in 999 calls, for example. That is why we need to put in place greater resilience, as the plan I have set out to the House does.