NHS Winter Crisis

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer, and I am pleased to see that he is still with us and in his place at this time. I wish him a very happy and prosperous new year. I question the idea that the Government and the NHS were prepared for this winter crisis. It seems to me that, if extra funding was made available in November and December, that does not smack of preparedness at all. I was very struck and somewhat chilled yesterday by what Andrew Marr said to the Prime Minister on his show. He said that had he experienced, when he had his stroke, the kind of five-hour delay experienced by Leah Butler-Smith and her mother, he would not have survived. I invite the Minister to have a stab at making a better job of answering that question today. What would he say to those whose lives have been put at risk by this winter crisis?

Will the Government be making available to us an analysis of the impact on patients, and the lives cost, of a combination of: 55,000 cancelled operations; 75,000 people held in ambulances; overstretched accident and emergency departments, with people on trolleys and even on the floor; up to 90% bed occupancy, which is very dangerous; a shortage of GPs; and inadequate social care due to the starving of funding to local authorities over a long period? When will we know what the impact of this has been on people? When will the Government properly fund and manage the winter stresses in our NHS?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I thank the noble Baroness for her good wishes, and I wish her and all noble Lords a happy new year. She asked several questions, and I will try to deal with them all. Her first question was about being well prepared. Those were the words of Sir Bruce Keogh from NHS England, not mine. I should also point out that Keith Willett, the director for acute care for NHS England, said that the service is better prepared than ever. Of course, that does not mean that there are not challenges. We know that this happens every year.

One of the ways that we see challenges happen is that there are cancelled elective procedures. I have been looking back over the data for the past 20 years. In quarter 4 of each year—January to March—those cancellations do happen. In fact, I was looking back at 2000-01 and there were 24,000 cancelled or postponed operations that year, which is actually one of the highest over that period. These things do happen during winter, and that is one of the ways of coping. The Prime Minister has apologised for that, and I endorse that. Of course, it is not a state of affairs that we want to happen, but it is necessary to make sure that the most urgent cases are treated. It should be pointed out that the direction about elective procedures made it clear that time-critical procedures around cancer operations and others can go ahead. We will see over time what the impact of that was.

I will mention one other thing about preparedness. The noble Baroness talked about bed occupancy. Of course, we know that high levels of bed occupancy are a concern. Bed occupancy was below the target of 85% going into this period—on Christmas Eve it was 84.2%, I believe—so that was put in place. We know it is going to be challenging. We know that flu is going to continue to have an impact over the next few weeks, and we will see what we can do, but we know that the NHS has put in unprecedented levels of preparation to make sure that we can get through what is always a difficult period.