Accident and Emergency departments haven’t been in good shape for years, with ambulances queuing up outside for hours, and patients increasingly having to accept that being treated in a corridor is a better result than still waiting to be seen.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said patients are “receiving unacceptable standards of care”, and that the situation in A&E makes him feel “ashamed”.
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Read MoreStreeting doesn’t seem to think so – and he would be foolish to take any other stance, as A&E is one of the most tangible ways the public measures the health of the NHS.
The NHS was managing 74 per cent when it went into the winter, so now 78 per cent is looking unrealistic in and of itself. Sources close to the Health Secretary insist that “there is no world in which we are going to accept urgent and emergency care stagnating from this point,” and that emergency care is impacted by failures and delays in elective treatment. People waiting 18 months for a hip replacement, for instance, are more likely to have falls and need emergency admission to hospital, so speeding up elective treatment does still relieve some of the pressure on A&E.
The public has long known that A&E is in a terrible mess, and so it may be the case that next winter Streeting is still able to say he is “ashamed” of the health service, safe in the knowledge that voters will agree with his blunt language and blame the Conservatives rather than grumble about what Labour is doing. But there still needs to be a sense that reforms are moving the service in the right direction.
Another striking comment made by Streeting this week was that the Government needed to bring the health service “into the 21st century so the NHS doesn’t go the way of Woolies and collapse, but is actually a service fit for the 21st century”. The problem with Woolworths was that consumers couldn’t see how it fitted into their present lives, no matter how nostalgic they were about buying penny sweets there on a Saturday morning in their youths.
The NHS is facing a similar precipice where, if it doesn’t seem to be improving tangibly by the next election, voters will start to conclude that nostalgia isn’t enough to keep it going. That’s not something Labour can contemplate.
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