NHS Winter Crisis — House of Lords, 2018-01-08
Topic: Health
James O’Shaughnessy (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, with the permission of the House, I will repeat as a Statement the response to an Urgent Question given by my honourable friend the Minister of State for Health in the other place. The Statement is as follows: "Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the right honourable gentleman for tabling this Question, as I agree with him that it is helpful for colleagues in this House to be updated on the current performance of the NHS during this challenging time We all know that winter is the most difficult time of year for the NHS, so I would like to start by saying a heartfelt thank you to all staff across the health and care system who work tirelessly through winter, routinely going above and beyond the call of duty to keep our patients safe. They give up their family celebrations over the holiday period to put the needs of patients first. It is these dedicated people that make the NHS truly great Winter does place additional pressure on the NHS, and this year is no exception. The NHS saw 59,000 A&E patients every day within four hours in November; that is 2,800 more each day compared with the year before. The figures for December will be published this coming Thursday. We have done more preparing and planning this year than ever before, with planning beginning earlier, meaning that the NHS is better able to respond to pressure when it does arise. In the words of Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, the national medical director: ‘I think it’s the one [winter] that we’re best prepared for. Historically, we begin preparing in July/August. This year we started preparing last winter. We have, I think, a good plan’ Let me tell the House about some of the things that have been done differently this year. We have strengthened further the NHS’s ability to respond to risk, including the NHS setting up the clinically led national emergency pressures panel to advise on measures to reduce the level of clinical system risk. We are supporting hospital flow and discharge. We allocated £1 billion for social care this year, meaning local authorities have funded more care packages. Delayed transfers of care have been reduced, freeing up 1,100 hospital beds by the onset of winter. Additional capacity has been made possible through the extra £337 million invested at the Budget, helping 2,705 more acute beds to open since the end of November. We have also ensured that more people have better access to GPs We allocated £100 million to roll out GP streaming in A&Es, and I am pleased that 91% of hospitals with A&E departments had this in place by the end of November. For the first time people were able to access GPs nationally for urgent appointments from 8 am to 8 pm seven days a week over the holiday period. In the week of New Year’s Eve the number of 111 calls dealt with by a clinician more than doubled, compared to the equivalent week last year, to 39.5%, reducing additional pressures on A&E. We also further extended our flu vaccination programme, already the most comprehensive in Europe. Vaccination remains the best line of defence against flu, and this year an estimated 1,175,000 more people have been vaccinated, including the highest-ever uptake among healthcare workers, which by the end of November had reached 59.3% We all accept that winter is challenging for health services, not just in this country but worldwide. The preparations made by the NHS are among the most comprehensive, and we are lucky to be able to depend on the extraordinary dedication of front-line staff at this highly challenging time".