A and E (Major Incidents)
Debate between Jeremy Hunt and Steve Reed(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Hunt
I take huge interest in individual examples of where things have gone wrong, and that has informed a lot of my approach to the job. Just like A and E departments, when ambulance services get calls, they have to triage them and deal with the highest-priority calls quickest. The calls they get can sometimes be dealt with after a period of hours, but other calls are much more urgent. The important thing for ambulance services is to know that we are backing them with more paramedics, more investment and more ambulances, and that is what we are doing.
Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)
One of my constituents, an 80-year-old woman, collapsed at home over the weekend. She had to wait an hour for an ambulance to arrive, and she then waited 10 hours in A and E before being treated by medical staff. For most of that time she was on a trolley in a corridor. Will the Secretary of State apologise to my constituent? Does he not regret wasting billions of pounds on a top-down reorganisation of the health service, instead of using the money to fund the additional doctors and nurses who could have treated my constituent and thousands of others like her across the country more quickly?
Mr Hunt
Management costs in the NHS doubled under the hon. Gentleman’s Government; under this Government, they have been cut by £1 billion a year, which is paying for 9,000 more doctors and 3,000 more nurses. That is the reality of the NHS under this Government—1 million more people are getting operations every year—and if he really believed in the NHS, he would support and welcome that, rather than criticise it.