Oral Answers to Questions

Philippa Whitford Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Alistair Burt]

The issue with ambulances and with quality of care elsewhere is the variation in quality. It is so important to ensure that local leadership addresses those local problems, because they are handled very differently in different places. It is right for my hon. Friend to raise this matter, and I am sure he has raised it with his local ambulance trust, as well as the hospital, to see how there can be better facilitation of patients going in and being discharged so that ambulances need not queue.

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

The Health and Social Care Information Centre has shown that last year 124,000 patients waited more than 12 hours after arrival at accident and emergency, which compares with a figure of 1,700 in Scotland, and the number has doubled since 2013. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has explained that these tend to be the sickest patients and that this delay is associated with increased mortality, so how do the Minister and the Secretary of State plan to improve that performance?

[Alistair Burt]

I have to tell the hon. Lady that patient satisfaction with A&E was rather lower in Scotland than it is in England, which indicates that we all have problems to deal with in this area. It is correct that we continue our progress both to increase resources throughout the health service and to A&E, and to improve transparency and people’s ability to see what is going on. Unacceptable waits are not part of what we all want to see from the NHS, which is why we are determined to drive them down. Patients in England will have the best information anywhere in the world about what is happening in their NHS, as we continue to drive efficiency and improvement.

[Dr Whitford]

Patients will not have the information about the four-hour waits, as that has not been published since November. The doctors required to look after these people are A&E specialists. There is already a major problem in retaining A&E trainees because they work a higher proportion of unsocial hours. These are exactly the hours that will be less rewarded in the new contract, so how does the Secretary of State plan to recruit and retain doctors in emergency medicine in the future?

[Alistair Burt]

There have been 500 more consultants in A&E medicine since 2010. The new contract is under negotiation at the moment and the majority of it has been agreed with junior doctors. It is designed to replace the failures in the old contract, which everyone knew needed to be corrected, and it provides the basis for the profession for the future to deal with some of the issues the hon. Lady mentions. All of us are concerned to ensure that the negotiations continue and that there should be no strike tomorrow, so that this pattern for the future, which is wanted by doctors and patients alike, as well as by the Government, gets a chance to work.