Winter Preparedness

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

I express my thanks and those of my Lib Dem colleagues to everyone working over the Christmas period to keep people healthy and safe. Preparedness for winter is absolutely critical for our health and care system, and a quick look at what happened last year shows us why. Ambulances across England collectively spent a total of 112 years waiting outside hospitals to hand patients over, and a quarter of a million people waited more than 12 hours to be seen. Every winter we are warned of a winter crisis. Under the Conservatives, crisis became the norm not just in winter but all year round.

This year is very concerning so far. A&Es have overflowed through spring, summer and autumn. At my local hospital trust, Shrewsbury and Telford, one in three ambulances have had to wait more than an hour to hand over patients, while patients with devastating cancer diagnoses have had to wait months for crucial scan results. Across England, more than 7 million people are on waiting lists. Meanwhile, I am afraid, we have not heard enough from the Government on fixing one of the root causes of this crisis, which is our broken social care system.

The scale of the crisis is demonstrated by the challenges facing ambulance services across the country at the moment. October—before the winter—was the third worst month ever for handover delays at West Midlands ambulance service, which covers my constituency. The equivalent of 130 ambulance crews are out of action, waiting every single day. Now these overstretched ambulance services are formally changing their advice to reflect the pressure they are under. At times of peak demand, even category 2 patients—those suffering a heart attack or a stroke—will be asked to make their own way to a hospital. People in North Shropshire have long had to put up with some of the worst ambulance waits in the country, and they have come to harm as a result. It may no longer be the case that they can rely on an ambulance arriving.

Action is urgently needed to prevent more preventable deaths this winter. I am sure the Minister shares my alarm that ambulances may not be reaching people facing life-threatening situations. If she does, will she commit today to the Government tackling the handover delays paralysing the ambulance service by accepting Liberal Democrat proposals to make a £1.5 billion fund to provide more staffed beds, and by agreeing to urgent cross-party talks to fix the crisis in social care?

[Karin Smyth]

I think I have addressed the Government’s plans on social care. The hon. Lady makes an excellent point on ambulance delays, which we know to be a problem, and particularly so in the west midlands. That is one of the things I have asked the system to look at particularly, so that the Government and hon. Members can better understand the particular problems in their particular systems. We know that ambulance and handover delays are a particular problem in some systems. We are making sure that clinical and managerial leads from NHS England are visiting those systems and that they are understanding in depth the process issues in some places, where they may not be adopting the best practice that can be learned from others.

We need to roll out best practice across the country. When the Secretary of State and I visited the operational centre of the London ambulance service, we sat in on some hear-and-treat calls; in dealing with people in mental health crises, in particular, some places are doing that better than others. Those are the sorts of examples we want to learn from. I absolutely hear what the hon. Lady says about the unacceptable delays in particular parts of the country. That is very much on our priority list.