NHS Winter Pressures

Jonathan Gullis Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

Looking at the media coverage, the hon. Lady raises a very fair challenge. To give her a sense of what underscores our approach, 15 trusts are responsible for 56% of ambulance handover delays, so the targeting of additional capacity—particularly how we target what we have announced on the areas where delays are most acute—is obviously one of the central things that we are doing at pace, and there is a significant concentration of that.

There are also opportunities to look at the variation in performance and what is working effectively in other trusts. That combination of control centres and better upstream demand management is absolutely core, particularly for cohorts such as dementia patients. There are significant opportunities to target interventions better—NHS England has been doing a lot of work on that as part of its 100-day sprint exercise—but we can do more and the funding announced today speaks to that.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

I put on the record my thanks to the incredible staff at the Royal Stoke University Hospital and the Haywood walk-in centre, who have faced unprecedented pressures. Tracy Bullock and Neil Carr deserve our full respect.

We have two problems in Staffordshire. One is that community first responders do not have blue-light ability, which was taken away by the West Midlands Ambulance Service. When will it be reinstated? The second is that community pharmacies can do more—I am delighted that we will see them do more—but their core funding needs to be increased, which it has not been since 2014. How will that be rectified?

[Steve Barclay]

On the blue-light ability, I am very happy to take that away and look at it. As is often the case, these things are slightly more nuanced, as I discovered when we were looking at Ministry of Defence ambulance drivers and their interaction with blue lights. I am very happy to look at that.

The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien), is looking at community pharmacy and, in particular, how we better enable patients to get the right treatment in the right place. Given that community pharmacies are accessible and sometimes get higher numbers in more deprived communities, there are significant opportunities for us to do more with them, and I know that that is something the ministerial team is working on.