Ambulance and Emergency Department Waiting Times

Naz Shah Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer.

“24 Hours in A&E” is not just a television show, but a reality that patients across the UK now face. It is no longer a short trip to the accident and emergency department, but a short stay in an accident and emergency ward, which means staff are effectively running two wards: the A&E ward and the ward where patients should have been moved to be treated. In Bradford, the demand for urgent and emergency care outstrips the capacity of hospitals to support patients, and that reflects the reality across the country. Unsurprisingly, the waiting time for emergency services and emergency department care will vary across the country, with waiting lists in the most deprived areas having increased by more than 55% compared with 36% for the least deprived areas.

As I have previously highlighted, children in Bradford wait 800 days longer for mental health intervention. The Government keep telling us that covid-19 is to blame for the waiting time, the backlog and the lack of resources and funding, but that could not be further from the truth. In fact, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport admitted that in her attack on the former Health Secretary, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), for failing to prepare for covid.

When a stroke patient does not get the urgent support they need, that can mean further damage to their health and life-long injuries, which in turn costs the NHS more. On the subject of ambulances, a dear friend of mine who is chief executive of My Foster Family, based in my constituency and with whom I have worked a lot, suffered a stroke last week. Shadim Hussain, who is 43 years old, is in the intensive care unit as we speak and I hope he will recover, although it will no doubt take a long time. When there is a 45-minute wait for an ambulance, there are two victims: the person in the ambulance who is waiting to be offloaded into the hospital and the person in the community who is waiting for the ambulance to get them to hospital. Shadim Hussain was taken to hospital in a car while he was being sick and suffering from a very serious bleed to his brain.

The UK has the second lowest number of beds per 1,000 inhabitants in the EU and the third highest decline in beds per 1,000 inhabitants in the EU. When Labour left Government in 2010, there were 144,000 hospital beds available, but at present there are around 128,000 hospital beds available.

When an 18-year-old woman suffering from a mental health crisis is forced to wait eight and a half days in A&E before getting a bed in a psychiatric hospital, that also costs the NHS more, but it is not just about the cost. The NHS was set up on a moral basis to provide care for our people; it was its birthday yesterday. Instead, people wait and pray, and some go home with more injuries or trauma. According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, whose representatives I met yesterday, the situation is 14% worse than the current statistics tell us.

However, the most recent British social attitudes survey recorded an unprecedented fall in public satisfaction with the NHS. When we left Government, we had the highest rates of satisfaction in the NHS as we had eliminated waiting times. We now have the lowest levels of satisfaction since 1997, with long waiting times at the top of the list of reasons given for dissatisfaction. That dissatisfaction is not due to the doctors, nurses, ambulance staff, receptionists or cleaners. As the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) said, the staff are often abused. The dissatisfaction is because of the lack of resource provided by the Government.

In Bradford, we have an increase in emergency department attendances, with some very busy days when we exceed 400 attendances in any given 24 hour period. Bradford Royal Infirmary is around the corner from where I live. There are currently 46 covid-positive patients in the hospital, or 1.5 wards-worth. The segregation of covid patients, elective and acute patients is impacting on the ability to place patients in the correct bed in a timely fashion, and all that exacerbates the strain on an exhausted workforce. The continued focus on the clearance of elective backlogs means that we are trying to undertake more elective procedures at the same time as dealing with all that, and there are workforce challenges associated with staff with covid infections and colleagues who have worked relentlessly through the pandemic. Despite all that, the trust continues to perform in the top quartile across a number of key metrics, including urgent, cancer and elective care.

I put on the record my thanks to all the staff, from the chief executive’s team to the porters who run the hospital, not just through covid—they continue to do so—in spite of the underfunding for years and years, before we even got to the pandemic, and despite not having the right resources now. The Government clapped for the NHS workers during the pandemic, but the claps were never enough. It is now time for action, not political slogans and gestures.