A Tory MP has admitted that the NHS is ‘broken’.
Cherilyn Mackrory spoke out after The Mirror revealed the ordeal of 87-year-old David Wakeley who was forced to wait in a makeshift shelter outside for 15 hours overnight with multiple broken ribs and pelvis.
And that incident came on the same day as a 90-year-old woman with a fractured hip waited 40 hours for an ambulance.
Both incidents happened in crisis-hit Cornwall where ambulances frequently wait for many hours in long queues with patients on board trying to find a bed in the county’s only main hospital in Truro.
The Truro and Falmouth MP said: “It’s horrible, isn’t it.
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SWNS)
“It’s got worse and worse. It appears to have been growing since the Covid impact but this year has just been horrible.
“And when you think you’re going to get some respite you just don’t, it gets worse and worse.
“It’s not to do with staffing of the ambulance service, it’s to do with the staffing of the care service in Cornwall.
“Not to sugarcoat the response but quite frankly I think we’ve been relying on, and taking for granted, care workers for too long.
“We’ve had too much cheap foreign labour if I’m completely honest about it, I think what we need to be doing is recognising care as a good career and a status that people want to be able to do.”
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AFP via Getty Images)
She has written a letter to Health Secretary Stephen Barclay about the issues.
She said: “I have invited him to come to Cornwall to visit the hospital and speak with hospital staff. He has made a promise to visit and he will.
“She said it had been hoped he would come in the summer but that had to be postponed so there are trying to fix a new date.
She said: “It is partly down to money but not just money. It is how things are managed locally,” she said.
In May inspectors said the number of ambulances waiting outside the Royal Cornwall Hospital was a “major issue.
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Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)
A month later the newly installed Chief Executive of the region’s newly formed Integrated Care System (ICS), Kate Shields, ensured she had taken in her new role to ensure such queues never happened again stating the “the proof will be in the pudding”.
She said: “We know we have ambulances waiting outside hospitals.
“No one here is proud of that.
“The aim of the ICS is for health and care organisations and local authorities to work together and speak with one voice in Cornwall for the benefit of patients.”
She added: “When I am old, I know where I’d rather be looked after, and it’s at home with care coming to me rather than in hospital.”
But it is not just the south-west which is struggling to cope with horrific ambulance delays reported across the nation in what many commentators have described as a social care crisis brought up by a backlog of Covid-related issues and a decade of Tory-led austerity.