National Health Service Infrastructure

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

We have been looking at providing additional funding and support to councils to meet the rising demands and to continue to stabilise the social care system. We announced access to an additional £1.5 billion of funding for adults and social care, and we will be considering this further in the spending review.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness will be aware that there was a spike in the incidence of flu just before Christmas; I do not know whether it has diminished, but it certainly was quite high. As a consequence, a number of people who perhaps would have much preferred not to go to hospital were forced to do so. She might like to know that, in one London hospital to which one of my family was obliged to go, the queue for A&E was out into the street. Many of those people were ill and should not have been outside in the cold. The reason for it was partly to do with availability of staff but more to do with the availability of chairs. Does she understand that hospitals need capacity beyond what their expectation might be of how many people will turn up, precisely to cope when there is a spike of this kind?

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

The noble Baroness is right that there has been a significant increase in demand over recent years. That is partly why we have secured the significant funding increase from the Treasury of £33.9 billion, which we will be enshrining in law for the first time to give certainty to hospitals. It is why we are increasing the capital investment, which will address some of the challenges that she has raised, and it is also why we have run a vigorous flu vaccination programme to prevent people from getting into that problem in the first place. We recognise that we need to reduce the demand from those going into A&E unnecessarily and to support those very hard-working staff who were in those situations over Christmas and the new year. We thank them for their hard work over that period.