NHS Winter Pressures

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

One of the things that my hon. Friend agrees with is that more decisions should be devolved rather than every decision being made in Westminster. Part of the reason for integrated care boards is so that they can look at where best to allocate their funds locally. He raises an extremely important point. He is right that around a quarter of delayed discharges are on the social care side—a fifth actually, in the NHS; there are a number of factors within that, which we will need to disaggregate.

On my hon. Friend’s point about local capacity, the Government are allocating the funding to his local ICB. I am sure he will have a conversation with his ICB on where the spare capacity can be best identified and rolled out at pace.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Last week, I met Hal Spencer, the chief executive of Chesterfield Royal Hospital; the pressures that he and his staff had faced as the hospital went into a critical incident over Christmas were etched all over his face. He spoke about the pressures on A&E registrars, ambulance drivers and nurses and about coming face to face with people who had been waiting 24 hours in a corridor on a trolley or who had been waiting many hours for an ambulance to turn up.

Is not the reality that this is a system-wide failure 13 years in the making? Did the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) not hit the nail on the head in saying that Labour has a long-term plan for our NHS and this Government do not?

[Steve Barclay]

On the hon. Gentleman’s first point, this is absolutely a system-wide challenge. That is why the use of innovations such as virtual wards in demand management upstream, in the care home or on the home, is important, just as discharge—getting patients to leave hospital who are fit to do so—is important. The focus has often been on ambulances being delayed at A&E or on the significant and real pressures in emergency departments themselves, but the challenge is much wider. That is what the funding in the autumn statement recognised.

In response to his second point about this being a longer-term issue in England specifically, I would just point him to the examples in Wales and the pressures in Scotland. This surge in flu combined with covid and the pandemic legacy that we have seen in England have created so much pressure over the festive period, and it is something with which many other health systems around the globe have also been grappling.