Oral Answers to Questions

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend has taken a great interest in this topic, and he is absolutely right to do so, because if we are to give integrated, joined-up care, in which people deal with NHS professionals who know about them, their medical history, their allergies and all the other important things, it is vital that, if they give their consent, their medical record can be accessed. That needs to be from GP surgery to hospital to social care system. Under the named GP policy that we have announced, there is a big opportunity for care homes to access GP records and keep them updated daily, so that GPs are kept in daily contact with how some of the most vulnerable people are doing.

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

Today I want to put to the Secretary of State new evidence that the A and E crisis is deepening, and having a serious knock-on effect on ambulance services. Information from police forces reveals that cases in which police cars have to ferry patients to A and E are far more widespread than people realise; in some areas, it happens on a daily basis. One ambulance service is now using retained firefighters to attend calls, and—this is how bad things have got—another ambulance service has seen a 350% increase in the number of 999 calls attended by taxis. Does the Secretary of State think that it is ever acceptable that when a patient dials 999, a taxi turns up?

[Mr Hunt]

I am afraid that that is utterly irresponsible. We are hitting our A and E target, and we are hitting our ambulance standard. When the right hon. Gentleman was Health Secretary he missed the ambulance standard for October, November, December and January. He is trying to talk up a crisis that is not happening. He should think about people on the front line and, just for once, put patients before politics.

[Andy Burnham]

The country will have heard the complacency from the Secretary of State. He needs to explain why he spent Friday afternoon making panicked phone calls to hospitals up and down the country that were missing their A and E target. He did not condemn the use of taxis, which is unacceptable but is happening on his watch because ambulances are trapped at A and E, unable to hand over patients. That means that 999 response times have got worse and large swathes of the country, right now, are without adequate ambulance cover. Is it not time that the Secretary of State was honest with the public and admitted the scale of the crisis facing the NHS this winter, and took action now to prevent it from engulfing other emergency services?

[Mr Hunt]

We will take no lessons in complacency from the party that did so little to sort out excess deaths in hospitals such as Mid Staffordshire, Morecambe bay, Basildon and Colchester, and many other hospitals. The truth is that, compared with when he was Health Secretary, we see nearly 2,000 more people every single day within the four-hour standard. We are doing much, much better: we have more A and E doctors, and the NHS is doing extremely well. I know that for him it is always politics first and patients second but, for once, he should be responsible and think about the people on the front line.