NHS Winter Update

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank my right hon. Friend for her work in the Department. She knows only too well the difference an inspirational leader can make to a local NHS trust, and at regional or national level. Managers who are good and committed to their local area, who work with their clinicians and other healthcare staff to try to look after patients all year round, have been put under the most enormous pressure over the last few weeks because of the strikes. I thank every single one of them for doing what they can to safeguard patient safety. As I say, I trust their judgment. If they have put patient safety mitigations in, it is because they consider, in their professional judgment, that they are needed.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

The public health director in Hull published her report recently. She talked about the double jeopardy that my constituents face: from the most disadvantaged communities, they have shorter lives in far poorer health. At the end of last year in A&E, patients were less likely to be treated within the four-hour target than anywhere else in England. Why is that after 14 years of a Conservative Government who are committed, apparently, to levelling up?

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Lady, who will know that our constituencies, albeit not necessarily in the same region, nevertheless share similarities, being relatively close to each other. The work and the progress made on urgent and emergency care is precisely because we were concerned about, for example, ambulance response times and hospital discharges. We worked with NHSE to bring together the urgent and emergency care plan and, for example, bring about 800 new ambulances on to our roads and about 5,000 more core beds into the NHS to try to address those needs. Unfortunately, the strike action that we have seen over recent days has very much militated against those efforts. We all accept that winter is a very difficult time for the NHS, and through the urgent and emergency care plan we have worked with NHSE to try to meet the demands that she so rightly puts forward.