Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)

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The Health Committee held an inquiry into winter pressures in accident and emergency departments. What we found, however, was that those pressures are now year-round, and that they worsen in the winter.

I would like to start by thanking all those who work in our national health service and our ambulances services, and all those who submitted written evidence and presented oral evidence to our inquiry. I also want to thank all fellow members of the Committee and the Committee team, especially Huw Yardley and Stephen Aldhouse, for their contribution to the report.

The root of the problem is unprecedented demand. It is not just about the sheer number of people arriving in our accident and emergency departments—on average, around 40,000 people attended a major accident and emergency department per day in 2015-16, which was 6,000 more per day than five years previously—it is also about the complexity of the conditions with which they are presenting. The worsening performance that we are seeing, which is of great concern to the Committee, is also a reflection of system-wide pressures across the whole NHS.

We noted that only approximately 88% of patients arriving at major accident and emergency departments are being admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. That is concerning, because it falls considerably short of the target performance standard of 95%. We should not think of this as just an arbitrary target or a tick in a box; it matters for patient safety and for patients’ experience of the care they receive.

Our report identifies a number of factors. We are also concerned about the level of variation in performance of accident and emergency departments. Often that performance cannot be attributed only to local pressures or demographics. We acknowledge that there are many things that hospital trusts can do to learn from the best performing departments to help improve the flow from the front door to the point of discharge, and to prevent people from getting caught in that revolving door by being readmitted. I pay tribute to the efforts of NHS England and of all those working locally and regionally to try to make sure that the NHS starts to learn from best practice, and I particularly commend Pauline Philip and her team for what they are doing.

One thing, however, comes across very clearly from our report: the impact that the deficiencies in social care are having on accident and emergency. If we cannot discharge patients at the end of their journey because no social care packages are available, it has a domino effect throughout the whole system. Not only that, but people arrive in accident and emergency departments who could have stayed at home if they had had the right social care package. The Committee therefore repeats its request to the Chancellor to look at social care in his autumn statement and to prioritise it.

We also recognised that many accident and emergency departments are under particular pressure because of their working infrastructure—the premises may be completely inadequate to cope with the increase in demand and complexity—so we repeat our call to the Chancellor to look in his autumn statement at the capital budgets in the NHS and to make sure that the funds are available to allow the transformative changes that can bring struggling A&Es up to the same performance level as those that are functioning the best.

There are also, of course, issues with the workforce. We are concerned about the impact of workforce shortfalls in the NHS, and we ask Health Education England to redouble its efforts to look at them.

When we visited East of England ambulance trust we found that it was concerned, as were others who submitted evidence, about the impact of delayed transfers at the front door of accident and emergency departments. Again, there is great variation, and it is not all about infrastructure. If ambulances are all gummed up in one accident and emergency department it has a serious knock-on effect within an ambulance trust area, so we call on those who are not putting in place the correct procedures to look carefully at the impact that that is having and to make changes this winter.

The Government also need to look at issues around alcohol policy. Anybody who has attended an accident and emergency department on a Friday or a Saturday night will know of the pressures that problem drinking creates. We ask the Government to consider making health an objective for licensing and to look at doing all they can to reduce the impact of alcohol. That impact is felt not just on waiting times, of course, but on the morale and wellbeing of staff working in our emergency services.

I thank all those who have contributed to this inquiry, and I look forward to hearing the Government’s response.

Dr Wollaston

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I thank the shadow Minister. The Committee agrees that there needs to be more funding for social care. We were concerned that the evidence we heard in this inquiry and previous inquiries is that the money raised from the social care precept has been swallowed up by the cost of the living wage. We absolutely welcome an increase in pay for hard-pressed care workers, but we feel that the increase in funding is completely inadequate to deal with the scale of the increase in demand.