The risk of a historically bad winter for England’s National Health Service emerged on Friday after fresh data showed a sharp deterioration in performance just hours after newly elected Prime Minister Boris Johnson had named the taxpayer funded organisation as his “top priority”.
Figures for November, before winter was even officially under way, broke a series of records. The number of people seen within four hours in emergency departments and the number waiting on trolleys after a decision had been taken to admit them to hospital were both at their worst levels since the data were first collected.
Not a single major A&E department met the current target, which requires that 95 per cent of people should wait no more than four hours for treatment.
Richard Murray, chief executive of the King’s Fund think-tank, said: “Winter has only just begun, and the NHS is already stretched to breaking point.” Increasing levels of flu and chronic staff shortages exacerbated by the continuing pension crisis “point to a torrid few months for the health service,” he said.
During the election campaign Mr Johnson made promises to invest in NHS buildings and equipment, recruit and retain more staff and develop a plan for reforming social care. “These performance figures underline just how urgently the new government needs to act on these pledges,” said Mr Murray.
Rebecca Fisher, a general practitioner and senior policy fellow at Health Foundation, a charity, suggested the money the government had promised was insufficient to deliver an improved service.
Dr Fisher said the foundation’s analysis “shows that the NHS will need an increase of £20bn by 2023-24 just to maintain standards of care but more will be needed to improve services”. The additional £18bn promised by the Conservatives during the election campaign fell short of what was needed, she warned. “As a result we can’t expect to see performance stabilise let alone improve any time soon.”
Mr Johnson, on the day he became prime minister in July, promised to “fix” social care “once and for all”. But he did not mention the issue in comments on Friday after he had secured a large majority in Thursday’s poll.
Dr Fisher said no solution for the NHS could be complete without action on social care. “The safety net is the NHS, but even this is at risk of breaking down if the government does not act swiftly,” she added.
One of the Conservatives’ most high-profile promises during the election campaign was for 50,000 more nurses, although critics were quick to seize on the fact that 18,500 of that number were to be existing staff either retained or lured back to the NHS.
Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust think-tank, said the new government “really will need to deliver” on the promised nurse numbers, “even if this means more reliance on migrants than they’ve said”.
The very poor A&E performance, with not a single large hospital meeting the standard, could be explained by very high bed occupancy levels, running at 95 per cent for the first week of December, “a level which will make it near impossible to admit many patients in need on to the right ward”, Mr Edwards added.
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December 14, 2019 at 01:41AM
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NHS misses targets for A&E waiting times in November - Financial Times
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