NHS: Winter Crisis

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Wednesday 7th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

As the noble Baroness knows, last year we had two significant spending announcements —there were two Budgets—in the March Budget on social care and in the November Budget for NHS funding, with billions extra being put into the service to meet very quickly rising demand. The review that will come out in summer will be a retrospective review of planning and the success of planning for winter. There will also be important lessons to be learned from it I am sure.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

Are the Government planning to ask NHS England to review the number of beds available, given that staff at the moment are starting shift after shift with no beds available and having patients who need IV therapy or even ventilation in their departments who cannot possibly be sent home? Staff morale is inevitably being undermined because they just do not know where they can put these patients.

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness is quite right to highlight the issue of bed occupancy; it is very high. The service managed to get it down below 85% before Christmas but inevitably it has risen since then. There is a big improvement in delayed transfers of care; we need that to continue to happen, and it was welcome that the Secretary of State for local government announced more funding for social care so that we can increase those transfers into social care and free up space in hospitals.