NHS Winter Pressures

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

My hon. Friend raises a brilliant point—one that I completely agree with—about how we upskill the existing workforce and get more people operating at what is referred to as the top of their licence. One of the key areas in the discussions we had at No. 10 on Saturday was how we can better utilise the existing workforce and their roles, and what regulatory changes we need to maximise that.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work that he did over the Christmas period as a community first responder. He is absolutely right: looking at how we better integrate the data available to paramedics, for example, and therefore enabling them to do more, is exactly the direction of travel that we want to take. I look forward to discussing that further with him.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Last month, I asked the Prime Minister about a constituent with dementia who waited three hours for an ambulance and then spent 10 hours in the back of the ambulance in the car park at A&E. We have heard much worse examples today. I have now been contacted by another constituent, who went into cardiac arrest at his GP’s surgery. He waited two hours for an ambulance, and the GP eventually ended up driving him to hospital and probably saved his life. Can the Secretary of State give us some confidence that everything he is talking about today will filter through quickly to ambulance response times? At the moment, my constituents are terrified that if they call for an ambulance, it will not come.