Ambulance Services and National Heatwave Emergency

Lord Watts Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord will know very well, we have put increased funding into our social care system, but we also have in place a national discharge task force to drive further progress and support regional and local system arrangements. That has membership from local government, the NHS and national government. Local health and social care partners are already standing up the use of additional action to support discharge and improve patient flow. The task force is looking at a number of interventions—for example, identifying patients needing complex discharge support early and ensuring multidisciplinary engagement in the early discharge plan. There is more support going into social care, but there is also a specific piece of work with the national discharge task force.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, have not the Government created the perfect storm? First, they cut the number of beds available, then they cut social care, then they do not plan for the number of doctors that we need, then they have Covid and now they have heat. What are the Government doing to address the long-term problem of hospitals that are underfunded and do not have enough beds, not enough GPs, accident and emergency units stopping functioning and the ambulance services being in crisis? What are the Government doing?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I am not sure that the Government are responsible for Covid. The pressures that we have seen on ambulances have come since the pandemic; we were seeing a much more effective ambulance service prior to that. But we need to fix that so, as well as the specific action that we are taking to improve resources in ambulances, including more staff, more call handlers and more funding into the 111 service, we also have a long-term plan for the NHS that is putting record funding into the NHS. We have also created integrated care boards to ensure integration between health and social care in local areas.