NHS: Long-term Strategy

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Commons Chamber

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

First, I want to share with the Health and Social Care Secretary my constituent’s recent battle to get medicine for his son, who had a high fever and symptoms that could be strep A. Unable to get a GP appointment, my constituent and his son had to travel out of the area to a local walk-in centre. They were then sent to the hospital, where they endured a six-hour wait. When the child was eventually examined, he was prescribed amoxicillin, but it was another long battle to find a pharmacist who stocked the antibiotics needed. My constituent said:

“Even I am shocked with what I have experienced over the last 24 hours.”

More and more people are finding out that the health service is no longer there for them when they need it. When someone has a child with serious symptoms and a temperature over 40°C, they should be able to access care quickly and not be forced to drive around for miles in desperation. My constituent also told me that he ran into several other parents that day who were experiencing the same issues in trying to get appointments and medicine for their children, who were very ill.

Nurses, doctors, ambulance workers, pharmacists, administration support staff and all those who, as part of our national health service, pour their energy into helping people when they are sick are worthy of our deepest respect and our thanks. The NHS crisis is not of their making. It is caused by the inability of the Conservative Government to plan or to support our health services adequately.

Many clinicians and commentators looking at the NHS crisis this week have raised the question of social care. Every year we revisit the pressures on social care and the desperate need for reform. Every year we see the consequences of Government inaction. We have had promise after promise of reform, but that reform is always dropped in favour of sticking-plaster solutions.

This week’s sticking-plaster solution gave the NHS some extra money, apparently to buy care beds. The deeper issue in social care is not beds, but the crisis in the social care workforce, with 165,000 posts vacant, representing one in 10 of the workforce. The NHS can buy beds in care and nursing homes, but that home may not have the appropriate staff available for the needs of the person being discharged. Unsuitable care will only lead to readmissions to hospital, so the cycle carries on. We know that in some parts of the country there are care deserts where there are no care home places. Does that mean that hospitals will start buying care home places tens or even hundreds of miles away?

The scandal of out-of-area placements is already a reality for many autistic people and people with learning disabilities. Chronic underfunding of social care and the lack of appropriate community services have entrenched a reliance on expensive in-patient care for autistic people and people with learning disabilities—care that is often far from home and not suited to the person’s needs. There is no extra funding to solve that problem. Indeed, the budget for those community services has been reduced this year from £62 million to £51 million.

We know that 2,000 autistic people and people with learning disabilities are trapped in that inappropriate in-patient care, which is often found to rely on the overuse of punitive seclusion and restraint. The fact that many placements are hundreds of miles away from family and friends makes the problem worse. Despite the steady stream of scandals, from Winterbourne View 11 years ago to the Edenfield Centre more recently, it is an issue that the Conservative Government choose to forget, even though it is destroying the lives of many of those detained and their families.

Our Opposition motion rightly ends with a call on the Government to

“end delayed hospital discharges…and reform primary and community care”.

Thirteen years of Conservative failure have led to this crisis. It will take a Labour Government to make the NHS fit for the future.