NHS England Update

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

The frustrating thing is that we are delivering the wrong care in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is delivering poorer outcomes for patients and poorer value for taxpayers. People cannot get a GP appointment, for example, which might cost the NHS £40, and then they end up in accident and emergency, which could cost £400. If people cannot find a bed for a delayed discharge and rehabilitation outside of hospital, they end up stuck in a hospital bed, wasting away at greater cost. In fact, when I was up in Carlisle earlier this year, such intermediate care was being offered by a local social care provider, commissioned by the NHS, at half the cost and of a much better quality than the hospital bed that patients had been discharged from. That shift to the community is about delivering better outcomes for patients and better value for taxpayers, and that will be reflected in our 10-year plan.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

I declare an interest as the vice-chair of the newly formed all-party parliamentary group on emergency care. A&E staffing across the country is dangerously low, especially at night, putting unacceptable pressure on staff, who warn persistently about the risks to patient safety. Hundreds of keen applicants are being turned away from emergency medicine training. Last year, there were 359 places for 2,718 applicants. Following this announcement, how quickly will emergency care and A&E departments see changes and have more permanent staff and consultancy places, but especially more training places?

[Wes Streeting]

We will shortly set out our emergency care improvement plan so that we can deliver the year-on-year improvements that people deserve. The long waiting times, not just in emergency departments but in ambulance response times and across the entire system, are completely unacceptable. I refuse to use terms such as “temporary escalation spaces” to describe the true grim reality of corridor care. That is a shameful situation, and I am genuinely sorry that patients are being treated in those conditions and that staff have to suffer the moral injury of working in those conditions. From the moment we came into government, we have worked to ensure that we got through the winter as well as we could. That is reflected in the fact that, despite the winter pressures, waiting lists fell five months in a row throughout the winter.

On the targets and standards challenge set out by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, ahead of the winter I was very clear with frontline leaders that patient safety must come ahead of performance targets—particularly the four-hour target—but the 12-hour target is absolutely related to patient safety, as I think the royal college would agree. We must work together to get waits of longer than 12 hours down as a priority, because those waits are directly linked to safety and patient outcomes.