Urgent and Emergency Care

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

I know my hon. Friend is a strong champion for this issue; when I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I remember him lobbying me about how a bridge from one bit of the hospital estate to another could provide additional capacity to meet the pressures his trust has faced. That is partly why we have been working intensively with the trusts that have the most severe cases of ambulance delays, looking through the work of the taskforce at best practice and what works best in those settings, and ensuring that the trust chief execs have the right level of support. It is important to recognise that the problem does not always manifest where it is caused. Quite often, challenges on the social care side, or further upstream in the conveyancing rate, put pressure on an emergency department and on the trust.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State is absolutely right about the abject failure in care that his Government have overseen over the past 12 years, but his statement did not refer so much to the pressures in A&E. It seems entirely wrong to me that if someone walks into an A&E department they are its responsibility, but if they turn up in an ambulance they are expected to sit in it for hours on end until the A&E is willing to take responsibility. Will the Secretary of State say more about dealing with the issue so that A&E departments realise that however someone arrives—whether they walk through the door or arrive in an ambulance—they should be the responsibility of the A&E, and the ambulance should be out fetching other people in the area?

[Steve Barclay]

The hon. Member makes a very fair point. Within the question he raises is the unmet need where an ambulance does not reach a patient in the community, as opposed to the known risk once the patient is within the hospital trust’s purview. On capacity in A&E, as I touched on in my statement, we put in £450 million at the 2020 spending review to upgrade A&E facilities at 120 trusts.

With respect to the hon. Member’s specific point, he may be aware of the letter that the NHS medical director Professor Stephen Powis and the chief nurse Ruth May sent at the time of the heatwave about where risk sits within hospitals. The taskforce has been doing further work on pre-cohorting, post-cohorting and observation bays so that we can better free up that ambulance capacity and get it back on the road.