Ambulance Pressures

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Henig) (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I invite her to speak.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I start by paying tribute to our ambulance and paramedic staff, as well as the ambulance call handlers. They are doing the absolute best they can despite the circumstances, and we owe them an enormous debt of gratitude.

There is no doubt that our ambulance services are at breaking point. Record-long ambulance waits are leaving vulnerable patients stuck in the heat outside hospitals, waiting for the treatment they need. There was a new first over the weekend, as temperatures rose, when patients inside ambulances were in a hospital car park for over 24 hours because A&E was full and there were no beds in the hospital.

This is not a recent crisis. Among many incidents reported in the press, a couple of months ago a senior NHS trust doctor in Gloucestershire rang 999 having had a suspected stroke, and was told to get a family member to drive her to hospital because no ambulance could get to her for at least an hour and there would then be a considerable delay after that. There are daily reports of people dying waiting for ambulances or in the back of an ambulance outside A&E.

Frankly, this Government have run ambulance services into the ground, with every single target being missed for the most severe cases. For months, they have failed to act on warnings that ambulance services are struggling to maintain a safe and timely service. The Government need to get a grip of this emergency. Even Liz Truss, one of the contenders to be the next Prime Minister and a very senior member of Cabinet, said in the ITV leaders’ debate on Sunday that ambulance waiting times in her rural constituency were “appalling”. Surely now is the time for Ministers to finally commit to commissioning the CQC to conduct an investigation into the causes and impacts of ambulance service delays, which would not just look at the very front line but take a whole, systemic approach.

One of the solutions proposed by the Secretary of State in the Statement is more use of 111 to ease pressure on call handlers receiving 999 calls, but there is already a major problem with 111: it takes much longer to get through and sometimes calls are not even answered. Not getting through to 111 will exacerbate waiting times and not help get them under control, because it risks piling even more pressure on our ambulance services, as desperate people whose conditions have worsened struggle and then turn to 999 instead. Can the Minister say what extra staffing and training there will be for the 111 service? Specialist training will be needed, because staff do not receive the highly specialised training that the 999 service call handlers do.

We need to remember that this is not just about ambulances, but they are the very visible evidence of a broken health and social care system. We on these Benches, and others around your Lordships’ House, have regularly been asking questions about our ambulance and A&E services, under pressure for well over the last six months. For years, we have also highlighted the shortage of hospital beds compared with other OECD countries. In 2021, the UK had 2.3 beds per 1,000 people, compared with France at 5.7 and Germany at 12.6. It was a mistake to cut so many beds. So will the Government undertake to fund thousands of extra beds to stop handover delays at A&Es, so that ambulances can get back on the road as soon as possible?

All of this is compounded by the lack of training and education places for doctors, nurses and other vital healthcare professionals, such as physios, occupational therapists, and speech and language therapists. Will any of the long-term plans to provide finance and support to enable hospitals to recruit and train more specialist healthcare staff be brought forward? Otherwise, we will just continue to lurch from crisis to crisis.

Finally, as the Statement notes, the Met Office has issued the first ever red warning for extreme heat, at a time when all 10 of our ambulance services in mainland England are already at the highest level of alert. The news this afternoon is of a number of serious fires in London and elsewhere; Hertfordshire, my local area, has had 240 calls to its fire service, which is many more than usual. Temperatures peaking at over 40 degrees centigrade just demonstrates that the pressure on ambulances, A&E and our wider NHS is likely to increase from injuries sustained by firefighters and those caught up in the fires.

The Statement talks as if the only effect is on people currently in hospital. The effects of climate change will make heat waves more frequent and intense in the future, so I ask the Minister what the Government are building in to help the NHS tackle the problems arising from these heat incidents, which sadly we must now plan for on a regular basis.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I thank both the noble Baronesses for their questions. I will do my best to address them. The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, first asked how these pressures had developed. It is fair to say that, while not all ambulance trusts were meeting their targets before the pandemic, there has been a significant shift in performance since the pandemic. The levels of service we are seeing at the moment are tied to that event, but I acknowledge pre-existing pressures in the system. There was a real change due to Covid, which has affected a number of factors, including staff absence, infection control and pent-up demand, where people might not have accessed health services during the peak of the pandemic.

The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, talked about the lack of a social care plan. The Government have been working to address social care over a number of years, putting in additional resources and measures to spread best practice and to increase the recruitment and retention of staff. There is more to do, and we are doing it. In 2022-23 the local government finance settlement made an additional £3.7 billion available to councils. Local authorities can make use of more than £1 billion of additional resources specifically for adult social care this year. That is part of £5.4 billion over the next three years to end increasing care costs and support the workforce. Specifically, £0.5 billion of that is to support and develop the workforce.

The noble Baroness asked me about the recruitment and retention of staff. Just to touch on two areas in terms of staff, we know that some of the delays are due to delayed discharge and its impact on social care, so we are making efforts to recruit more social care staff. Care workers are eligible for the health and care visa; they have been added to the shortage occupation list. There has been a national recruitment campaign in this area, and we are working with DWP to promote adult social care careers. We have also put in resources to increase the number of certifications that people can get if they want to train in this area.

To touch on another area of staffing, the paramedic workforce, the number of ambulance staff and support staff has increased by almost 40% since February 2010. The number of paramedic-qualified staff has grown year on year. Health Education England has mandated a target of training 3,000 paramedic graduates nationally per year between 2021 and 2024, further increasing our workforce.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, also asked about the workforce. Of course we have our targets to increase the number of nurses and doctors in the NHS and the number of domestic training places for both those occupations, and we continue to make good progress on both those areas. We need additional staff in our NHS, and efforts are being made to train them.

The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, I think, asked about the letter that went out about measures to reduce the handover times with ambulances. My understanding is that that will not involve new pieces of hospital estate but rather making better use of the existing hospital estate. I assure them that that is looking not at more corridor care but at how the estate is used more flexibly.

The noble Baroness asked what reassurance I could give to families waiting for ambulances or those in ambulances waiting to be transferred to emergency departments. That was the aim of the letter that has gone out from NHS England. We are looking at the balance of risks. We now need to reduce handover times and wait times in the community because, when people have been through the urgent care process, there is a lower risk of having to manage increased demand through additional flexibilities at that stage, rather than people waiting in the community not having been assessed by a paramedic, for example. That is the aim of what was in the Statement yesterday.

As the Secretary of State made clear yesterday in the House, a contract is being procured for auxiliary ambulance services. That is expected to be concluded shortly. The noble Baroness also asked about the process around the COBRA meetings we have held. It is the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’s responsibility to chair the civil contingencies COBRA meetings, and that is what he has been doing. There were several meetings over the weekend, I think, and one yesterday. It will continue to meet as long as that is needed. I am afraid I do not have a response to her on the national resilience strategy consultation, so I will happily write.

The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, also talked about the support for staff working in the heatwave. That is absolutely part of NHS trusts’ plans for this kind of scenario. It was also re-emphasised in the letter from NHS England and NHS Improvement to trusts yesterday. She is absolutely right that we need to take steps now to build more resilience in the system ahead of the winter, when we know pressures grow. That is absolutely a focus for the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and NHS Improvement and others.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, asked about resources going into 111. We are further building the capacity of NHS 111. We are increasing staffing throughout this year, scaling up call handling across regional footprints while maintaining a focus on getting patients access to local services. Additional funding was also put into this—£50 million in 2022-23—to support increased call-taking ability. I think I have addressed her points on training places. In terms of extra beds, to stop the A&E delays we have talked about, we are looking to make efforts to reduce the handover time to 30 minutes. I know that in other actions on delayed discharge, initiatives have been made such as step-down beds to try to increase the flow of patients through A&E.

Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned the fires, which are of course extremely concerning. The London Ambulance Service is currently supporting the London Fire Brigade in responding to several fire incidents across London. They are in attendance, on scene, at a number of locations. The DHSC and NHS England are monitoring the situation closely. That is quite a live situation, so that is the best update I can give at this time.