NHS Winter Crisis

Philippa Whitford Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dunne]

I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for making those points. He brings to the House considerable experience of what it is like to be responsible for the NHS. He is absolutely right: the number of over-80s who are presenting to hospital A&Es is going up exponentially each year. Hospitals need to adapt the way that they treat such patients to try to keep them as healthy as possible so that they can live independently for as long as possible. That is why many hospitals are now introducing frail elderly units close to or at the front door of A&E departments so that they can turn around patients and avoid admissions. My right hon. and learned Friend is also right to point to the increasing integration between the NHS and social care that is necessary to encourage more people to live independently out of hospital and leave emergency departments for those people who are urgently ill.

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

I, too, pay tribute to staff across all four health services, where the normal pressures have been added to this winter by freezing weather and influenza. Scotland still leads in A&E performance across the UK, but we do not need to see four-hour data to understand the stress that NHS England is under. Thousands of patients have been held in ambulances for more than an hour outside A&E before they can even get in, which means that ambulances could not respond to other urgent calls, and that has obviously put other patients in danger. We have heard about patients being held in corridors for hours at a time, causing not just suffering and danger to patients, but enormous stress to those staff to whom we are paying tribute.

The Minister talks about the elderly population. We need to have beds for that population. England has halved its number of beds in the past 30 years, and now has only 2.4 beds per 1,000 population, compared with four in Scotland. Will he and the Secretary of State make sure that there are no further cuts in the sustainability and transformation reorganisation, and will they look at how they replace the money that has been cut from social care so that when elderly patients are ready to go home they can do so and free a bed for someone else?

[Mr Dunne]

As I have already said, the social care funding has gone up very significantly this year, and there is a second billion pounds to go into social care over the next two years. The hon. Lady is right to point to Scotland having a slightly better A&E performance than England, and the two countries are far better in performance terms than any other country that we regularly monitor, but she has to be a little careful when she talks about how Scotland is performing so much better. She talked about waits. It is the case that the over-12-hour trolley waits in England for November were half the rate of over-12-hour trolley waits in Scotland. We are providing information, and we are increasingly trying to be more transparent about the impact of winter on our health service in England. I strongly encourage her to take back to her colleagues in the Scottish Government the amount of data that is being published in England and to see whether they can try to match it.