Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress she has made on (a) implementing the actions in the urgent and emergency care plan and (b) preventing ambulances queuing at hospitals.

We have made significant progress in implementing the Delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services since it was published in January 2023. A summary is set out in the document, Urgent and emergency care recovery plan Year 2: Building on learning from 2023/24, which is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/urgent-and-emergency-care-recovery-plan-year-2-building-on-learning-from-2023-24/

Progress includes delivering 5,000 additional core hospital beds, exceeding our virtual ward bed capacity ambition, with over 12,000 now available, and increasing same day emergency care services across the country. These measures are helping to improve patient flow through accident and emergency (A&E) and reduce the ambulance capacity lost to handover delays.

Since the publication of the plan, both A&E and ambulance performance has improved during 2023/24, compared to the previous year. In addition, average ambulance patient handover times have fallen to 32 minutes 42 seconds in April 2024, from 37 minutes 33 seconds in October 2023, when the publication of this data began.