A and E Waiting Times

Debate between Martin Horwood and Jamie Reed

Tuesday 23rd April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Reed]

I note that the Minister prepared an answer, and I am grateful for that.

Major accident and emergency units—type 1 facilities, nationally—have missed the target for at least the last six months, and all A and E units, including minor incident units, have not hit the target for 12 weeks in a row. If anyone needs help analysing the figures, I would be happy to oblige. They are easy to find and they reveal some interesting points. For example, I wonder whether hon. Members know that only one trust with a major accident and emergency unit in England has hit its target every week since the Secretary of State took his position. That is relegation form, and if this were a football match the cry from the crowd would be “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Before the Minister attempts yet again to dismiss those statistics, I hope she will take a moment to attend to what has been said by the chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, by Dr Clifford Mann of the College of Emergency Medicine, and by David Behan of the Care Quality Commission. Earlier this month, Dr Peter Carter, of the Royal College of Nursing said:

“These figures are yet more proof of a system running at capacity, and patients are suffering as a result. Our members are regularly telling us that pressure on the system is rising while staffing levels fall, and as a result any increase in demand results in unacceptable waits for patients who are already going through a difficult time.”

Dr Clifford Mann, of the College of Emergency Medicine said:

“We are seeing...ambulances queuing outside departments, and patients waiting too long on trolleys before they can be admitted to hospital.”

The Care Quality Commission said:

“It is disappointing that people have said they have to wait longer to be treated than four years ago. People should be seen, diagnosed, treated and admitted or discharged as quickly as possible”.

Like me, the Royal College of Nursing, the College of Emergency Medicine and the Care Quality Commission will be appalled that the key performance indicators for the NHS, such as A and E waiting times, are getting steadily worse. In the past six months, 582,811 people waited more than four hours in major A and E units, compared with 420,921 for the same period in the previous year. That is an increase of 161,890 people. That is not silly: it is a question of people’s lives. Those figures relate to people in need who did not get treatment in the time when they needed it. They represent more than 500,000 extra waiting hours in one year. People will find it hard to stomach the fact that there are now about 5,000 fewer nurses than there were in 2010, at a time when, as hon. Members on both sides of the House have mentioned, demand in our A and E units is increasing.

One way to get the figure down—it has been touched on already in the debate—would be to offer services for people with non-emergency ailments, so that they do not feel the need to travel to an A and E department. However, instead of NHS Direct being used as a tool for easing pressure on A and E departments, the roll-out of NHS 111 has turned into a trade marked Government shambles. Patients calling the new 111 service wait hours for advice. One patient waited 11 hours and 29 minutes for a call back. No wonder they feel that they have to go to A and E, when they cannot trust a telephone service with such an inadequate response rate.

Accident and emergency departments are a litmus test, or a barometer, for the performance of the NHS as a whole. If people are waiting in A and E, it means that there are too few beds or too few staff to cope with demand. That is just a fact of health service planning. If there are too few beds, it is because community services are being cut and patients who should be at home are kept in hospital. That reverberates back through the entire system. If patients who could be at home are in hospital, beds are occupied. If beds are occupied, A and E staff cannot admit patients. If A and Es are full, paramedics cannot hand over patients. If patients are queuing in the back of ambulances, those ambulances cannot respond to a potentially serious call-out. One failure leads to another. Each compounds the other. That is what is so serious about the debate. It is not just about the patient sitting in A and E for hours on end; the statistics I have highlighted show much more than that—the experiences of patients throughout the entire system.

[Martin Horwood]

In my remarks I suggested another possible factor in the current problems of emergency departments: the difficulty in recruiting emergency doctors. That may have something to do with the attractiveness of emergency medicine as a specialty—the long hours, and so on. However, it also obviously dates back to the training numbers that I am afraid prevailed under the Labour Government. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that there may be some such responsibility, dating back several years, in relation to attracting sufficient numbers into training for emergency medicine?

[Mr Reed]

I expect the Minister to talk about new doctors in the NHS when she replies to the debate; and, of course, we trained those doctors. We commissioned, paid for and put in place the training of those doctors, so I take what the hon. Gentleman says seriously. I also commend him for being the only Member of Parliament from either of the coalition parties to attend the debate to defend the Government’s record.

The statistics highlight more than the simple numbers: they show the experience of patients throughout the system. One person waiting in A and E can reflect one person in a bed on a ward and another waiting at home for an ambulance. I hope the Minister will acknowledge and accept that, and explain what the Government plan to do. It is essential that they explicitly acknowledge the problems faced by accident and emergency in England. Constant denials do them no credit. They must acknowledge the scale of the problem before any solutions can be introduced.

The NHS in England is completely different from the NHS in Wales. I expect the Government will be tempted to compare the two, but I want to address the issue head on. The reality is that Welsh Ministers are dealing with a £2.1 billion real-terms cut to their budgets. Yet, despite that, they have still managed to protect NHS services. There are now more GPs working in Wales than in 2010, and the number of nurses, midwives and health visitors has remained consistent. That is in stark contrast to England, where nurse numbers are falling. I am sure that hon. Members who have heard such tired comparisons over and over would be interested to know that there are differences in the way A and E waiting times are measured in the two countries, and in how frequently performance is measured.

Before any comparison is made—and I hope that none will be—I want to point out that it is misleading to try to make a direct comparison. However, it is fair to say that all parts of the UK are experiencing increased pressures on A and E. The key difference is that in Wales, Labour are doing something about it, whereas in England the coalition is sitting on its hands. In Wales, 270 additional beds were opened this winter to cope with demand, easing pressure throughout the system. The Welsh Government have also agreed an all-Wales action plan for unscheduled care, which means that health boards must ensure that they have sufficient capacity to meet demand.

Will the Minister inform us today what the Government plan to do to help A and E services in England? When and where will they start to provide such help, and how much will it cost?

That aside, will the Minister also answer a few important questions on A and E waiting times? First, will she explain why, when demand is clearly so high and the current services are at breaking point, the Government have handed P45s to almost 5,000 nurses? Will she also explain why the Secretary of State chose a period of intense demand and structural reorganisation to roll out the 111 service when it was clearly not ready to be rolled out?

May I tempt the Minister to speculate on the causes of that rise in A and E waiting times? Does she agree that a combination of inadequate staffing levels, a distracting reorganisation of the NHS and deep cuts to council care budgets is the principal reason for the sharp increase in A and E waiting times? If she does not agree that they are having a major impact on the NHS, can she explain why the Government think that fewer nurses and a distracting reorganisation have improved services?

The problems that others and I have outlined today are well known to many, but they are still sadly neglected by the Government. Despite its imperfections and its many real challenges, the NHS remains one of the best models of national health care in the world. It is filled with dedicated professionals who believe passionately in the aims and values of the service, but it is clear that an expensive, unwanted and unloved reorganisation, combined with Government-induced staff shortages, are causing and have caused deterioration in performance. That is unfair on health care professionals, and, far more importantly, it is unfair on patients. I look forward to the Minister explaining in detail how her Government intend to get a grip and bring all A and E services in England back up to national standards.

National Policy Statements (Energy)

Debate between Martin Horwood and Jamie Reed

Monday 18th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

I rise to speak to the nuclear national policy statement in particular on behalf of the Liberal Democrat party, and to state our clear and unchanged view that nuclear power is unsafe, unaffordable, uninsurable, unpopular, not renewable, not decentralised, not particularly reliable, and not the kind of energy that the greenest Government ever should ever be caught promoting. When we are already paying £1.5 billion a year in nuclear clean-up and decommissioning costs from the previous generation of nuclear power stations, when we still do not know how, when or where we will dispose of the last 64 years’ worth of radioactive waste, and when country after country is abandoning nuclear power, it is extraordinary that one of the national policy statements before us today seriously proposes embarking on a new generation of nuclear power stations.

[Mr Jamie Reed (Copeland) (Lab)]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, but he must desist from peddling the myth that the decommissioning costs that this country faces are entirely due to the civil nuclear programme. Does he not accept that most of those costs are due to our military programme?

[Martin Horwood]

I accept that a percentage of them are—we have debated this at length in relation to the Energy Bill—but the hon. Gentleman must accept that a huge bill is still falling on taxpayers in this country as a result of the last generation of nuclear power stations. Why would we want to risk repeating that mistake?

I acknowledge that nuclear power is a relatively low-carbon energy source, but it is not renewable. Uranium is very far from being a renewable resource, and may prove to be very expensive if more of the world chooses to follow us down this dangerous path, although few would do so if even the insurance costs of nuclear power were accurately reflected in its price. One estimate suggests that French nuclear power might be four times as expensive if the French taxpayer were not the insurer of last resort.

I also acknowledge—I agree with the Minister on this point—that fulfilling our future energy needs is a challenge. The overarching national policy statement sets out the need for urgency, with one quarter of the UK’s generating capacity due to close by 2018, but the nuclear NPS states on page 235 that applicants only have to provide a plan that is

“credible for deployment by 2025”.

It even states that

“a detailed project plan…will not normally be needed.”

The worldwide experience is that not a single nuclear power station has ever been built on time, on budget or without public subsidy. It is very doubtful what contribution nuclear will make to closing the energy gap.