Health Secretary Wes Streeting has admitted he is ‘distressed and ashamed’ at the experiences of some patients in the NHS amid another winter crisis in hospitals.
A number of NHS trusts in England have declared critical incidents due to ‘exceptionally high demands’ on emergency departments.
A patient at one hospital was forced to wait 50 hours to be admitted to a ward, with experts blaming seasonal flu for overwhelming emergency care systems.
Speaking to LBC radio, Mr Streeting said some patients are being taken to hospital ‘to die’ because the right care is not available when they need it.
He confessed to feeling ’emotional’ when hearing about long waits and patients being passed from ambulance to ambulance.
The Health Secretary also acknowledged ‘it’s my head on the chopping block’ if he fails to meet Labour’s targets on reducing NHS waiting times.
Hospitals in Northamptonshire, Cornwall, Liverpool, Hampshire, Birmingham and Plymouth have declared critical incidents.
East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust also declared the first critical incident in its history due to a combination of ‘significant patient demand, pressure within local hospitals and flooding’.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has admitted he is ‘distressed and ashamed’ at the experiences of some patients in the NHS amid another winter crisis in hospitals
Ambulances outside the Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital. A number of NHS trusts have declared critical incidents amid ‘exceptionally high demands’ on emergency departments
Non-urgent patients have been warned they will face long waits in A&E and have been urged to ‘consider other options’, such as contacting their GP, visiting a pharmacy or calling NHS 111.
Mr Streeting said: ‘It breaks my heart because… I’ve seen this when I’ve been shadowing the ambulance service on ride outs – we are taking people in ambulances to emergency departments to die because then there isn’t the right care available at the right time in the right place, including end-of-life care.’
He said that sometimes hospitals are not accepting patients from ambulances ‘because emergency departments are saying: ‘Well, hang on a minute, we can’t take these people in right now.’
But he said that was creating ‘intolerable patient risk’ for the people that ambulances cannot reach when they are struck outside hospitals.
The Health Secretary added: ‘When I hear you describe an 88-year-old woman going from ambulance to ambulance to ambulance to ambulance, I felt the same emotional reaction I went felt when I was going around one of my local hospitals just before Christmas.
‘When I went in, they said: ‘You are here on a fairly good day, it’s not too bad today. And as I was walking through the emergency department, I was looking at the corridor care that’s become a normal feature now in our hospitals.
‘I went through a section of the emergency department where there were lots of frail elderly people, including people with dementia, who were very confused, very distressed, crying out, not so much in pain as much as confusion.
‘And as I walked around these conditions, I was looking around thinking: ‘This is a good day?”
Mr Streeting pledged to do ‘everything I can’ to ‘make sure that year-on-year, we see consistent improvement’, but he added that it will ‘take time’.
He said the Government would publish an urgent and emergency reform plan ‘shortly’.
‘In the meantime, I feel genuinely distressed and ashamed, actually, of some of the things that patients are experiencing and I know that the staff of the NHS and social care services feel the same, they go to work, they slog their guts out, and it’s very distressing for them seeing people in this condition as well,’ he continued.
On flu, Mr Streeting added: ‘We’ve got this extraordinary pressure on flu where we’ve got between three and four times as many hospital beds taken up with flu cases this year than we did this time last year.
‘Even so, annual winter pressures should not lead to an annual winter crisis.’