The comments made by Liz Truss, the Prime Minister, on 10 October 2022.
This country has come a long way in how we talk about mental health, something we can all be proud of. I’m committed to ensuring people get the support they need to thrive, expanding mental health support for children and people getting back into work.
The comments made by Chloe Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, on 10 October 2022.
On World Mental Health Day, it is important to recognise the virtuous circle between health and work – we know that giving people the support they need to work is very good for their long term health.
The Government’s growth-focused agenda will deliver jobs, higher wages and greater opportunities – and I am delighted that people who have faced barriers to entering the workforce due to poor mental health will now be able to access support across England.
Helping people access both clinical support for their mental health as well as employment advice gives them the tools they need to get into or return to work. This is vital to helping drive down inactivity and growing our economy so we can deliver more money and support for public services such as these.
The speech made by Therese Coffey, the Deputy Prime Minister and Health & Social Care Secretary, in Birmingham on 4 October 2022.
Conference, I am delighted to be here in Birmingham for my first speech as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, and as Deputy Prime Minister.
I was here just a couple of months ago for the Commonwealth Games,
And I was absolutely blown away,
by the Games themselves,
and also by how the city has been transformed since we were last here.
And that is thanks to Conservative Mayor, Andy Street.
Andy has shown,
That being ambitious for the people and communities he represents,
getting on with the job at hand,
and focusing on delivery,
is exactly what our voters want,
and why he was re-elected,
resoundingly.
Conference, as a Conservative government,
we believe in the Great British people,
and we are ambitious for our country.
Despite the severe challenges facing the global economy, in the wake of Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and the aftershock of Covid,
Now is the time we must come together,
to tackle the issues that we have long faced.
And we will take decisive action
to get Britain moving again….
… from getting Britain building,
to channelling investment into local areas,
to helping families get on in life.
We will deliver, deliver, deliver…
Conference,
Our National Health Service has the admiration and gratitude of the British people, particularly for getting us through COVID.
The doctors, the nurses, the midwives, the paramedics, the chemists, the cleaners, and all the clinical and support staff,
As well as all the carers, working in care homes or our communities.
They regularly go the extra mile.
They are the pride of Britain.
The NHS is and always has been a national endeavour.
That was set out in 1944, when it was a Conservative politician, Sir Henry Willink, who put forward the proposals for “A National Health Service”.
That’s right, a Conservative MP,
from my home city of Liverpool,
who conceived the NHS,
– a good omen, I think!
And I continue to be proud of the many doctors, nurses, and dentists serving as Conservatives in Parliament,
far more than we see in the Labour Party.
And it is because of our Conservative Party’s commitment to the NHS,
…That we will be spending 173 billion pounds this year on health and social care, in England alone,
…up from 124 billion pounds when we entered office in 2010,
…and that’s accounting for inflation –
This has resulted in more doctors and nurses than ever before.
But, as Health Secretary, it’s my job to be honest, and level with you about the scale of challenge ahead of us.
And frankly,
I won’t be turning to Labour for solutions.
If you want to see the Labour Party running the NHS,
just look across the border into Wales,
where around 60,000 patients are still waiting for more than 2 years for treatment, higher than last year.
This isn’t the time for brickbats though.
It is precisely because healthcare matters so much
that we need to have honest discussion
and be prepared to hold the NHS to account
forging a partnership with them focused on delivery, not on dogma.
So, let’s be honest.
While most patients receiving care in our NHS have a good experience,
Too many do not…
…Whether it’s the 8am scramble to see a GP…
…Or the long waits to get tests or treatment…
Or the struggle to see an NHS dentist at all.
Much of this has been made worse by the pandemic.
And I must level with you,
Backlogs are expected to rise before they fall,
as more patients come forward for diagnosis and treatment.
But this isn’t just about Covid.
There is still too much variation in patient experience.
I saw that for myself this July when I went to A&E.
I waited nearly nine hours to see a doctor,
before being asked to return the next day for treatment.
Now I knew, from previous experience,
that would be too late,
so I took myself to a different hospital,
and was treated that same day.
That is the sort of variation we see across the NHS.
From two hospitals just a couple of miles apart, and it must change.
That is why my first job in the Department was creating Our Plan for Patients, which puts the needs of patients front and centre.
Our new Plan for Patients deliberately places an emphasis on primary care, the gateway to the NHS for most people.
It empowers doctors and nurses by reducing bureaucracy,
…which gets in the way of them doing their jobs.
And it seeks to improve performance across the country by unlocking data.
Now,
You may have heard ‘ABCD’ are my immediate priorities.
No, I wasn’t broadcasting my A Level results to the nation.
Nor was I reciting a new hip hop beat by Dr Dre.
Those four letters represent my commitment to focus – resolutely – on the issues that affect patients most:
Ambulances.
Backlogs.
Care.
Doctors and Dentists.
And with my excellent ministerial team,
Robert Jenrick,
Will Quince,
Neil O’Brien,
Nick Markham,
and our very own in-house ministerial medic, Dr Caroline Johnson,
Together, we WILL focus on the issues that affect patients most
To deliver their priorities.
AND be their champion.
Starting with ‘A’ for Ambulances.
Access to urgent treatment can be life-saving.
When people phone 999 because they think they or their loved one is having a heart attack or a stroke, they want to know help will come,
and will come soon.
Let’s be clear,
Average waiting times are too long,
So, we are increasing the number of 999 call handlers.
And we must also get ambulances back on the road from handovers at hospitals,
so we are placing a laser-like focus on our most challenged trusts, because as we saw last winter,
nearly half of all handover delays were at just 15 trusts.
We also know to be able to admit more patients,
we need to open up more space in hospitals.
So we are acting immediately to create more capacity,
the equivalent of 7,000 more beds, this winter.
But it’s not just capacity in our hospitals we need,
it’s also in our communities,
to help support people…
…who could be cared for more appropriately at home or in a care home, rather than being kept in hospital, unnecessarily.
That is why the ‘C’ for care is such an integral part of Our Plan.
And why we have invested a further 500 million pounds this winter,
so local councils and the local NHS,
can work together to tackle delayed discharges.
It isn’t all about emergency care though.
It is also about diagnosis and treatment.
And that is where we go back to ‘B’ for backlogs.
The waiting list for planned care, made worse by the pandemic, currently stands at about 7 million.
This includes people waiting for diagnosis, to know if they need any treatment at all.
While, in England, we have now virtually eliminated waits of over two years,
we are speeding up our plans to roll out community diagnostic centres, as well as new hospitals.
And we will maximise the use of the independent sector too, when patients are waiting too long for treatment.
Lastly, but key is ‘D’ – for doctors and for dentists.
Now, I think it is perfectly reasonable when people need to see a GP, they should expect to do so within a fortnight.
Of course, I would like to be more ambitious, and while I will not be prescriptive on how GPs interact with their patients,
I am clear Patients must be able to see their doctors promptly.
To help achieve these priorities,
I will publish a lot more information for patients,
so they can see how their local NHS is performing, including their GP practice, and on access to NHS care and treatment.
Another key element is personnel.
I have listened to why people say they are leaving the NHS,
or what is holding them back, from offering more services.
And I am responding.
I am empowering GPs to use their funding more flexibly for the recruitment of more support staff, and making significant changes to pension arrangements.
I am extending the emergency clinical register,
so that health professionals who have come out of retirement,
can continue to practise for a further two years.
I am opening up more prescription capability and services to pharmacists.
I am investing in IT for telephony and digital appointments.
And I am making it easier for clinicians registered outside England to be accredited, to get to work more quickly, treating patients.
It is, frankly, bonkers, that we have restrictions on the recognition of doctors, dentists, and nurses within the UK itself.
That is why I am laying regulations next week,
…which will allow the General Dental Council to get on with accrediting dentists to work right across our United Kingdom,
so we can have oases of oral care, rather than dental deserts.
This is all on top of our existing commitments,
to boost the health and care workforce,
including our manifesto pledge to recruit 50,000 more nurses by 2024.
Conference,
Whether you live in a city or a town,
in the countryside or on the coast,
this Conservative Government will always be on your side,
when you need care the most.
This is just the start of our ambitions for health and care.
Our Plan informs patients and empowers them to live healthier lives.
Because we know prevention is better than cure.
It is right we continue our longer-term health approach,
Strengthening mental wellbeing and resilience,
as well as the physical health of the nation,
because that is also good for the economic health of the nation.
We have a record number of people, in work, on the payroll, but there are many vacancies still to be filled.
We know work is good for you,
both physically and for mental wellbeing,
as well as putting more pounds in your pocket.
That is why I will strive to support
those not working now due to ill health,
to help them to start, stay, and succeed in work;
building on the Prime Minister’s pledge to have more mental health support in communities.
Because together, we can deliver a healthier, more productive society, all the stronger, to help grow our economy.
As the Prime Minister said on the steps of Downing Street,
she has three clear priorities:
growing the economy,
tackling energy security and costs for households and businesses;
and the NHS.
When I first went into the Department,
I asked what the biggest risk was this winter and what we could do to help?
I was told – help with energy bills,
so older people would not worry about the cost of turning on the heating,
and for health and care providers too.
The Prime Minister and the Chancellor listened.
They acted.
They have delivered.
And we need to act on growing the economy too.
We need a strong economy to have a strong NHS.
We need a resilient, sustainable economy,
to have a resilient, sustainable NHS.
And we need a compassionate, and considered, Conservative government,
to deliver, deliver, deliver.
And that, Conference,
is what we will do.
Thank you.
The speech made by Wes Streeting, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, on 28 September 2022.
If you want to see a monument to the Conservative Party’s mismanagement of the NHS is it this.
David Wakeley, an 87-year-old pensioner with cancer.
The makeshift tent was made by his son, to provide cover for David as he lay shivering on the rainswept concrete floor where he’d fallen.
He had fractured ribs and a fractured pelvis.
And he was forced to wait 15 hours for an ambulance.
This is the state of the NHS in Tory Britain and it is an absolute disgrace.
We have the highest NHS waiting lists in history.
People unable to see their GP.
Heart attack and stroke victims left waiting longer than an hour for an ambulance when every second counts.
The Tories will try to blame the pandemic.
But we had 100,000 NHS staff vacancies before the pandemic.
NHS waiting lists were already at a record 4.5 million BEFORE the pandemic.
The number of cancer patients not getting care on time rose in every single year since the Tories came to power BEFORE the pandemic.
The longer the Conservatives are in power, the longer patients will wait.
The Tories run from their record, but we’re proud of ours.
Proud of 89,000 more nurses.
44,000 more doctors.
Faster cancer treatment.
The lowest waiting times on record.
And the highest patient satisfaction in history.
That’s the difference a Labour government makes.
But the challenge today is even greater than it was in 1997.
The very principle of an NHS publicly funded, free at the point of use, is now under attack.
Conservatives who spent the last 12 years running down the NHS are now using their failures to claim that the NHS is beyond repair.
Lots of you know that I went through kidney cancer last year.
When I received that cancer diagnosis there were so many things I worried about.
But the one thing I didn’t have to worry about was the bill.
So, to those who argue we should abandon a publicly funded NHS free at the point of use I say: over my dead body.
I’m a Labour moderniser.
I make no apology for it.
Because if we don’t modernise and change the NHS, it will become unsustainable.
So, here’s what we’ll do to make the NHS fit for the future.
Without a workforce plan, the Conservatives have no plan for the NHS.
Everything else they announce is a sticking plaster that fails to address the root cause of the NHS crisis.
Politics is about choices. Labour believes the country needs doctors and nurses more than the richest need a tax cut.
So, we will double the number of medical training places
And create an extra 10,000 nursing and midwifery clinical placements every year.
More doctors, more nurses, lower waiting times, higher standards for patients
That’s the Labour pledge at the next general election.
Alongside investment will come the change and modernisation that the public are crying out for.
Voters won’t accept pouring money into 20th century healthcare that isn’t fit for the future.
We don’t focus nearly enough on prevention, early intervention and care in the community.
Because people can’t see a GP they end up in A&E, which is worse for them and more expensive for the taxpayer.
Because people can’t get the mental health support they need, they reach a crisis point, which is worse for them and more expensive for the taxpayer.
Because people can’t get the social care they need, they’re left stuck in hospital, which is worse for them and more expensive for the taxpayer.
So, the next Labour Government will agree a 10-year plan with the NHS to shift the focus of healthcare out of the hospital and into the community.
Our plan to recruit more doctors will deliver better access to GPs and ease pressure on A&Es.
Our plan to recruit 8,500 mental health workers will provide faster treatment, support in schools, and ease pressure on hospitals.
And our commitment to deliver better pay, terms and conditions for care workers, will reduce the 400,000 delayed discharges every month and provide better quality care for older and disabled people.
The first steps on the road to a National Care Service.
There are so many people in hospital who wouldn’t need to be there if we could provide quality care at home.
District nursing will be at the heart of Labour’s plan.
The Conservatives have cut four in ten District Nurse posts.
Labour will double the number of District Nurses qualifying every year.
For kids from working class backgrounds like mine, life chances and even life expectancy can be determined from the moment we’re born.
Health visitors have such an important role to play in helping Mums and Dads but they are managing dangerously high caseloads.
So, we will train 5,000 health visitors to tackle the shortage and give every child the best, healthy start in life.
Our 10 year plan for the NHS will be the antidote to the Tory miserablism about the NHS and its future.
I want Britain leading the revolution in medical science and technology.
It offers a world of possibility for the NHS to transform patient care.
Technology can diagnose patients more accurately than the human eye.
Virtual wards allow people to receive hospital care at home.
But the biggest prize of all is the advance in genomics and the data revolution that will allow us to transform our model care from one that diagnoses and treats illness to one that can predict and prevent it.
This will be at the heart of Labour’s 10 year plan for change and modernisation.
And so will higher standards for patients.
As Labour’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, I’ll be the shop steward for patients.
Giving patients a voice as well as choice.
Patients deserve better than a two week wait to see a GP.
I have higher standards for patients.
When we were in government, Labour guaranteed appointments within two days.
Labour will give all patients the ability to book online, the opportunity to self-refer to specialist services where appropriate and a wider range of choice so that we can choose whether we want to see someone face-to-face, on the phone or via a video link.
The days of waiting on the phone at 8am to book an appointment with your GP will be over and we will bring back the family doctor.
Patients need a Labour government.
The NHS isn’t just Labour’s greatest achievement.
It’s Britain’s greatest achievement.
And the values that underpin the NHS – a publicly funded public service, free at the point of use – aren’t just Labour’s values, they are Britain’s values, too.
And our Party has always understood that the NHS needs to change to adapt to modern challenges.
So now it falls to our generation.
No more over-flowing A&Es and waiting weeks to see a doctor.
No more patients dying before they can get the treatment they need.
No more staff in tears, leaving the NHS, broken and exhausted.
No more cancer patients left under make-shift shelters in their gardens, waiting 15 hours for an ambulance.
Instead – a Labour Government:
Empowering patients.
Cherishing staff.
Shifting to prevention.
Caring in the community
Giving real choices.
Tackling inequalities.
Building a National Care Service.
And an NHS fit for the future.
The cavalry is coming with Labour.
So, let’s go out there and win for Labour, win for the NHS and win for Britain.
Thank you.
The comments made by Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative MP for South West Surrey and the former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the House of Commons on 22 September 2022.
I welcome the Secretary of State to her new role. As I know, it is the hardest job in Government, but she has a zen-like calmness which means that she is well suited to dealing with the pressures that lie ahead.
There is much to be welcomed today, particularly the pension rule changes, the additional funds for social care and the new powers for pharmacists, but may I ask the Secretary of State to rethink the new two-week access target for general practice? If targets were the answer, we would have the best access in the world in the NHS, because we have more targets than any other healthcare system in the world. GPs alone have 72 targets, and adding a 73rd will not help them or their patients, because it is not more targets but more doctors that the NHS needs. Will the workforce plan to which the Secretary of State recommitted herself—I welcome her commitment to publishing it—include hard numbers, so we can know how many doctors we will need in 10, 15 and 20 years’ time and whether we are actually training them, and will she publish it before Christmas so that staff can at least go into the winter knowing that there is a plan for the future?
The speech made by Wes Streeting, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the House of Commons on 22 September 2022.
I welcome the Secretary of State and her team to their new posts. I thank her for advance sight of her statement, but if any evidence were needed of a Government and party out of ideas, out of time and without a clue about the scale of the challenge that our country faces, the statement would be it.
The NHS is facing the worst crisis it has ever seen, with patients waiting longer than ever before in A&E, stroke and heart attack victims waiting an hour for an ambulance, and 378,000 patients waiting more than a year for an operation—and that was in the summer. We have gone from an NHS that treated patients well and on time when Labour was in office 12 years ago to an annual winter crisis, and now a year-round crisis under the Conservatives. But don’t worry: the Health Secretary has a grip on the key issues. She does not have an answer on the workforce, but she has sorted out the Oxford comma. I am sure that the whole country is breathing a sigh of relief about that.
The Health Secretary promised a digital revolution in the NHS. Well, Conservative Health Secretaries have promised a digital revolution 17 times since 2010. [Interruption.] Oh, apparently she did not say that—she is not promising a digital revolution. That is good news, because I do not think that the staff who are slogging their guts out in the most difficult conditions in history will be particularly impressed by the introduction of that cutting-edge modern technology, the telephone. The NHS can finally axe the carrier pigeon and step into the 20th century. I am sure that staff are absolutely delighted.
Madam Deputy Speaker,
“these measures will not come close to ensuring patients who need to be seen can be seen within the timescales set out…they will have minimal impact on fixing the current problems that general practice is facing over the winter”.
Those are not my words; they are the NHS Confederation’s verdict on the Secretary of State’s plans. Are they not the truth? The Secretary of State says that patients will be able to get a GP appointment within two weeks, but her party scrapped the guarantee of an appointment within two days that Labour introduced when we were in government. She made it clear this morning that it is not a guarantee at all, but merely an expectation—and what is the consequence if GPs do not meet her expectation? As we heard on the radio this morning, her message to patients is “Get on your bike and find a new GP.” Are patients supposed to be grateful for that?
Who will deliver the appointments that the Secretary of State is promising: the 6,000 GPs her party promised at the last election but will not deliver, or the 4,700 GPs her party has cut over the past decade? Where will these GP appointments take place? Certainly not in the 330 practices that have closed since the last general election alone. The Conservatives promising to fix the crisis in the NHS is like the arsonists promising to put out the fire that they started.
As if that were not bad enough, the super-massive black hole at the heart of the Secretary of State’s plan is the lack of a workforce strategy. She has no plan to provide the doctors that our NHS so desperately needs. Despite her “Sesame Street” approach to politics, in her A, B, C, D plan—by the way, last time I checked, S was for social care—she has missed the N for nurses. I say to the Secretary of State that without a plan to tackle the staffing crisis, she does not have a plan for the NHS. What is she going to do about the staff shortage of 132,000 in the NHS today?
The Secretary of State talks about £500 million to speed up delayed discharges. Is that a new investment or a re-announcement? She is right to say that if patients cannot get out the back door of hospital because care is not there in the community, we get more patients at the front door and more ambulances queuing out at the front. That is exactly where we are under the Conservatives today. But she misses the crucial point: unless the Government act on care workers’ pay and conditions, employers will not be able to recruit and retain the staff they need. What is her plan to address that?
Patients will have been concerned to read reports that after the Conservatives failed to hit the four-hour A&E waiting time target for seven years, the Health Secretary is planning to scrap it altogether. I notice that she was not brave enough to say that today; I hope that she will not do so. Can she reassure the House and patients across the country that her response to the crisis in the NHS will be not to lower standards for patients, but to raise performance instead?
The Secretary of State is the third Health Secretary in less than three months. The faces change but the story remains the same. There is still no plan that comes close to meeting the scale of the challenge—no plan for staffing and no real plan for the NHS. It is clear that the longer the Conservatives are in power, the longer patients will wait. As Dr. Dre might say: time for the next episode.
The statement made by Therese Coffey, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the House of Commons on 22 September 2022.
I am pleased today to set out to Parliament our plan for patients. As the Prime Minister said on the doorstep of Downing Street, she had three clear priorities: growing the economy; tackling energy security and support for households and businesses; and the NHS, with patients being able to get a GP appointment.
Patients are my top priority and I will be their champion, focusing on the issues that most affect them or their loved ones. Most of the time, patients have a great experience, but we must not paper over the problems that we face. We expect backlogs to rise before they fall as more patients come forward for diagnosis and treatment after the pandemic, and the data shows, sadly, that there is too much variation in the access and care that people receive across the country.
The scale of the challenge necessitates a national endeavour. As we work together to tackle these immense challenges, I will be proactive, not prescriptive, in our approach as we apply a relentless focus on measures that affect most people’s experience of the NHS and social care.
Today, we are taking the first step in this important journey by publishing “Our Plan for Patients”, which I will lay in the Libraries of both Houses. It sets out a range of measures to help the NHS and social care perform at their best for patients. The plan will inform patients and empower them to live healthier lives; place an intensive focus on primary care, the gateway to the NHS for most people; use prevention to strengthen resilience and the health of the nation; and improve performance and productivity.
To succeed, we will need a true national endeavour, supported by our making it easier for clinical professionals to return to help the NHS, as well as drawing on the energy and enthusiasm of the million people who volunteered to help during the pandemic by opening up opportunities for them to help in different ways. That could be by becoming a community first responder, or by, for example, strengthening good neighbour schemes across the country. We will also explore the creation of an ambulance auxiliary service.
The plan sets out our work on the ABCD of priorities that affect most people’s experience of the NHS and social care. First, on ambulances, I want to reduce waiting times for patients and apply a laser-like focus on handover delays, so that ambulances get back on the road and to patients, where they are needed most.
Our analysis shows that 45% of the delays are occurring in just 15 hospital trusts. That is why the local NHS will be doing intensive work with those trusts to create more capacity in hospitals—the equivalent of 7,000 more beds—by this winter through a combination of freeing up beds, with a focus on discharge, and people staying at home and being monitored remotely through the sort of technology that played such an important role during the pandemic. In addition, when patients call 999, the speed of answering is critical, so we will increase the number of call handlers for both 999 and 111 calls.
Next is the backlog, where the waiting list for planned care currently stands at about 7 million, exacerbated by the pandemic. This summer, we announced that we have virtually eliminated waits of over two years, and we remain on track to reach the next milestones in our plan. To boost capacity, we are accelerating our plans to roll out community diagnostic centres as well as new hospitals, and we will maximise the use of the independent sector to provide even more treatment for patients.
As well as capacity, we are also getting more people on the frontline, making it easier for people to work in and help the NHS. We know that people are leaving the workforce for a variety of reasons. We have listened, and we are responding and addressing a number of those reasons. For instance, pension rules can currently be a disincentive for clinicians who want to stay in the profession or to return from retirement and help our national endeavour. We will correct pension rules relating to inflation; we will expect NHS trusts to offer pension recycling; and we will extend until 2024 measures that will allow people to stay or return to the NHS.
I can announce today that we will extend the operation of the emergency registers for health professionals for two more years. That is, of course, on top of commitments to boost the health and care workforce, such as our manifesto pledge to recruit 50,000 more nurses by 2024. That will sit alongside the design and delivery of our forthcoming workforce plan.
C is for social care. At the moment, one of the key challenges is discharging patients from hospital into more appropriate care settings to free up beds and help improve ambulance response times. To tackle that, I can announce today that we are launching a £500 million adult social care discharge fund for this winter. The local NHS will be working with councils with targeted plans on specific care packages to support people being either in their own home or in the wider community. That £500 million acts as the down-payment in the rebalancing of funding across health and social care as we develop our longer-term plans.
I know that there is a shortage of carers across the country. We will continue to work with the Department for Work and Pensions on a national recruitment campaign. In addition, since last winter, we have opened up international recruitment routes for carers. We will support the sector with £15 million this year to help to employ more care workers from abroad. We are also accelerating the roll-out of technologies such as digitised social care records, which can save care workers about 20 minutes a shift, freeing up time for carers to care.
Finally, D is for doctors and dentists. I am determined to address one of the most frustrating problems faced by many patients: getting an appointment to see their doctor, or getting to see a dentist at all.
Starting with doctors, we are taking five steps to help make that happen: first, setting the expectation that everyone who needs a GP appointment can get one within two weeks; secondly, opening up time for more than 1 million extra appointments, so that patients with urgent needs can be seen on the same day; thirdly, making it easier to book an appointment; fourthly, publishing performance by practice to help to inform patients; and fifthly, requiring the local NHS to hold practices to account, providing support to those practices with the most acute access challenges to improve performance.
Clearly, clinicians are best placed to prioritise according to the clinical need of their patients. In July, 44% of appointments were same-day appointments, but too few practices were consistently offering appointments within a fortnight.
To help free up appointments, we will ease pressures on GP practices by expanding the role of community pharmacies. I am pleased to announce that we have agreed a deal for an expanded offer over the next 18 months. Pharmacists will be able to prescribe certain medications rather than requiring a GP prescription. As well as other measures involving community pharmacists, we estimate that that will free up 2 million appointments. We are also changing funding rules to give freedoms to GPs to boost the number of staff to support their practice. We estimate that that measure could free up 1 million GP appointments.
For patients, we will make it easier for them to contact their practice, both on the phone—we are making an extra 31,000 phone lines available this winter, followed by further deployment of cloud-based telephony—and online, particularly through the NHS app. As I set out, we will also correct pension rules so that our most experienced GPs can stay in practice. By extending the emergency register, we are creating opportunities for people other than GPs to undertake tasks such as vaccinations.
On dentists, there are too many dental deserts. That is why we are setting out an ambition that everyone seeking NHS dental care can receive it when they need it. We have already started changing the dental contract to incentivise dentists to do more NHS work and take on more difficult cases. I pay tribute to my predecessors in this role for their success in beginning to tackle this long-standing issue.
We will also streamline routes into NHS dentistry for those trained overseas so that they can start treating patients more quickly. We will make it a contractual requirement for dentists to publish online whether they are taking on new NHS patients.
These measures, across a number of important areas, are the start, not the end, of our ambitions for health and care. They will help us to manage the pressure that health and care will face this winter and next, and they will improve these vital services for the long term. My priorities are patients’ priorities, and I will endeavour, through a powerful partnership with the NHS and local authorities, to level up care and match the expectations that the public rightly have. Whether you live in a city or a town, in the countryside or on the coast, this Government will be on your side when you need care the most. I commend this statement to the House.
The comments made by Colm Gildernew, the Sinn Fein Health Spokesperson in Northern Ireland, on 16 September 2022.
Reports that pressures in our health service had led to 300 more deaths than expected this year are staggering and underlines the urgent need to get the Executive up and running and for all parties to work together to make health the priority.
How much longer will the DUP sit on the sidelines and continue to boycott government while people suffer on waiting lists and our health service continues to feel the pressure?
We will meet the health minister next week on the urgent need to recruit more doctors and nurses, cut waiting lists and to properly invest in our cancer and mental health services.
Sinn Féin is ready to form an Executive today, to work with others, and start to fix our health service by investing an extra £1 billion and securing a three-year Budget.
The speech made by Wes Streeting, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the House of Commons on 5 September 2022.
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement, and wish him and the ministerial team well as the new Prime Minister appoints her first Government. I also welcome what he said towards the end of his statement about the importance of vaccination and funding for motor neurone disease.
Emergency care is in crisis. After 12 years of Conservative Governments, the NHS can no longer reach patients on time. The outgoing president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said earlier in the summer that ambulance delays had got so bad that the NHS was now “breaking its promise” to the public that life-saving emergency care will be there when they need it. Twenty-nine thousand patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E in June, more than ever before. Ten thousand urgent cases waited more than eight hours for an ambulance last month. It is estimated that the collapse of emergency care that we are now seeing could be costing 500 lives a week. If the statistics did not paint a stark enough picture, no one can ignore the case of 87-year-old David Wakeley, whose family had to build a shelter around him as he waited outside for an ambulance, with broken bones, for 15 hours. What a shameful indictment on 12 years of Conservative mismanagement of the NHS.
There have been recent reports that the NHS will tell patients to
“avoid A&E as the winter crisis bites early.”
That was in August. The simple fact is that we have gone from no crisis in the system in 2010, to annual winter crises, to the situation we have today where there is a crisis all year round—the worst crisis in the history of the NHS. There is no point in the Secretary of State blaming the pandemic or, indeed, the extreme heat we saw this summer, although they do not help. The reality is that, before the pandemic, the NHS had not hit the 18-minute response time target for emergency incidents since 2017. Will the Secretary of State, on behalf of the Government and his party, finally take some responsibility and admit what his colleague the Culture Secretary was honest enough to say, that the Conservatives left our health service “wanting and inadequate” when the pandemic hit?
The NHS needs Ministers to grip this crisis and work tirelessly to get patients the care they need, so where have the Government been all summer? It is almost as if, the moment the Conservative leadership candidates hit the road, the Cabinet turned on their “out of office” and hit the beach as the NHS slipped into the worst crisis in its history and the Government did diddly-squat on the cost of living crisis, which will also exacerbate people’s health problems.
I pay tribute to St John’s Ambulance for the vital work it does, and I am pleased it has now been formally commissioned to provide England’s ambulance auxiliary. Can the Secretary of State confirm that this capacity is being used by the system today? Perhaps he might have a word with his colleague the Secretary of State for Education, or his successor, about recruitment, because the shambles we saw on T-levels and the hand-wringing we saw from the exam boards is unacceptable and risks the pipeline of talent we need to staff the NHS.
Although extra capacity is important, let us be honest that it will not solve the ambulance crisis unless we tackle the delayed discharges that are causing logjams in hospitals. The Secretary of State talked about this, but let me be clear that one in seven hospital beds is occupied by someone who is medically fit to leave but cannot do so because there is no support available—some people are waiting up to nine months longer than needed. What is the answer to this staffing crisis? It has not been to pay care workers a decent wage so that we stop losing them to the likes of Amazon, and it has not been to provide a great career so that people in our country enter this important profession. The answer has been to pull the “immigration lever,” to quote the Government, and to recruit people from overseas on lower pay. How fitting that this Prime Minister’s Government ends with yet another broken promise. One year after promising to fix social care by hiking taxes on working people, where is the plan to tackle the work- force crisis without resorting to immigration every time?
Finally, the Secretary of State barely mentioned the cost of living crisis. The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup), has said the Government are worried that if people cannot afford to heat their home, more will lose their life to flu. Has the Secretary of State made an estimate of the number of people who could fall ill as a result of soaring energy bills? As this is rightly a concern, may I point out that there is a plan right in front of him to freeze energy bills, fully costed and ready to go, paid for by a windfall tax on the oil and gas companies? When will the Government stop dithering, delaying and talking to themselves and start acting for the country? Rising energy prices will also push care providers to breaking point, with some facing closure as they are unable to absorb increases of 500% or more. What plans does he have to prevent care home residents from being booted out this winter and to prevent care home doors from closing?
The reality is that this Government are now out of time. A new Prime Minister will be appointed tomorrow who has suggested charging patients to see a doctor. I did not think anything could be worse than fining people for missing appointments, but our new Prime Minister has somehow managed it. Public satisfaction with NHS services is at its lowest recorded level, and patients are struggling to access the care they need. Under Labour, patients could call 999 knowing that an ambulance would come when they needed it, but the longer we give the Conservatives in power, the longer patients will wait.
The statement made by Steve Barclay, the then Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the House of Commons on 5 September 2022.
Over the summer recess, the Department of Health and Social Care has made significant progress in many areas, both to prepare the NHS and social care systems for the winter and to lay the foundations for further improvements in the coming years.
In respect of preparations for winter, the Department has worked closely with NHS England and other Departments across Government to:
Widen and launch the covid autumn booster programme, including through the first approval worldwide of two “bivalent” vaccines, which protect against both the original and omicron strains of covid-19;
Increase capacity in primary care, including through additional roles in primary care;
Put in place plans to boost the NHS’s capacity by the equivalent of 7,000 beds, including through the use of innovative “virtual” beds;
Increase the numbers of call handlers in both the 999 and 111 services respectively, with a target of having 2,500 call handlers in 999 and 4,800 call handlers in 111 by the end of December; and
Agree a new ambulance auxiliary contract with St John Ambulance, providing at least 5,000 hours of extra support each month.
The Department, the NHS and local authorities also continue to work together to address ambulance handover delays and delayed discharges, including by identifying the actions for which NHS leaders are responsible, and those for which social care leaders are responsible, thus supporting accountability.
Over the summer recess, we have also been focusing on increasing the NHS and social care workforce, by drawing on both domestic and international sources, with the aim of increasing the capacity of the NHS and social care systems both in the short term and over time. Our international recruitment taskforce is developing plans for implementing a “support hub” to help care providers recruit from abroad, and the Department is laying regulations to help increase the capacity and capability of the professional regulators to test the standards of overseas recruits. We also launched a consultation on 28 August with the aim of extending “Retire and Return” NHS pension changes through to 31 March 2023, allowing retired and partially-retired NHS staff to continue to receive important pension changes if they re-enter the workforce. Further work is also under way, including the consideration of further options on the pensions of healthcare professionals.
The Department continues to work closely with NHS England to address the covid-19 waiting times backlog—104-week waits were virtually eliminated, in line with the elective recovery plan, and the NHS is making good progress to address 78-week waits by April 2023. In support of this:
A further 50 surgical hubs were given the go-ahead over the summer, in addition to the existing 91 surgical hubs;
A further seven community diagnostic centres were given the go-ahead. The programme has so far delivered an extra 1.7 million tests; and
Choice of provider at the point of GP referral will be available to all patients from April 2023 at the latest, supported by information to be made available to patients through the NHS app
A number of reforms looking to the long-term needs of the NHS and care system are also now under way:
Work led by Professor John Deanfield is considering how we better embrace home testing for a wider range of conditions through a modernised NHS health check;
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is expediting work to consider how to improve the uptake and adoption of well-evidenced MedTech; and
Standardised, modular hospital design—delivering scale and process efficiencies—will be adopted as the default for cohorts 3 and 4 of the new hospitals programme. Enabling works for the new hospitals at Whipps Cross, Kettering and Hillingdon have been unlocked, and the strategic outline case for Shrewsbury and Telford has been approved.
Good progress continues to be made on the development of framework 15 and the NHS workforce plan. The future needs of the NHS and social care systems are best met by a workforce which is trained flexibly, which is adaptable, which embeds new roles in clinical practice, and which allows all health and care professionals to practise at the top of their competence.
Taxpayers expect the Department and the NHS to continue to be effective stewards of public money. We have therefore imposed further controls on the use of consultancy, professional services and contingent labour, with the aim of generating at least £170 million of additional savings over this financial year, with further recurrent savings thereafter. We have also instituted new mechanisms to assist transparency: more than 50,000 people work in national and local NHS organisations which do not provide direct patient care; and to help those who work in the NHS and the wider public understand more about the value delivered, we are today publishing an organogram of the Department—to be made available on a searchable platform over the coming days—followed by searchable organograms for NHS England and the other national arm’s length bodies by the end of September. Integrated care boards are being asked to emulate this approach.
There has also been progress on a number of other very important issues including:
The publication of the women’s health strategy;
The launch of the Government’s dementia mission; and
Confirmation of interim payments to those who have been infected by contaminated blood and bereaved partners
In November 2021, the Government announced it would make £50 million funding available for research into motor neurone disease over five years. Following work over the summer with DHSC and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, through the National Institute for Health and Care Research and UK Research and Innovation, to support researchers to access funding in a streamline and co-ordinated way, we are pleased to confirm that this funding has now been ringfenced. DHSC and BEIS welcome the opportunity to support the motor neurone disease scientific community of researchers, as they come together through a network and link through a virtual institute.
The Department has taken these actions to help the NHS and social care systems be better prepared for the winter challenges ahead and beyond.