Ambulances with patients are queuing outside A&E departments overwhelmed by demand for care
(Picture: PA Wire)The crisis-hit NHS “can’t keep up” with “phenomenal demand” and has too few staff to treat patients safely, senior MPs warned on Wednesday.
Steve Brine, Conservative chairman of the Commons health and social care committee, told of the “terrifying situation” facing Britain that the health service will not be sustainable if far more is not done to prevent ill health in the country.
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting stressed that the NHS “simply doesn’t have the staff it needs to treat patients safely and on time”.
Their warnings came as ambulances are queuing with patients outside A&E at many hospitals around the country, with doctors and nurses overwhelmed inside casualty departments by the huge number of patients.
Mr Brine told Times Radio: “The NHS is in a very serious situation.
“It is worse than last year.
“Post pandemic, the staff in the NHS, who like many areas of work, who go the extra mile and then some, they are exhausted burnt-out.
“You have then got the twindemic. There are more people in hospital now with flu than there are with Covid.”
Demand for healthcare had gone “through the roof,” he added, emphasing that some ambulance crews had seen ten times the number of calls than they did pre-pandemic.
He stressed: “The demand is so phenomenal right now that the NHS can’t keep up.”
Currently, £152 billion was being spent on the NHS a year in England, he explained, questioning how any huge injection of extra funding would be paid for, possibly by higher taxes.
He defended the Government as being “honest” about the challenges facing the NHS and funding provided, with “vast, vast sums”.
He added: “It has never had more public money.
“But if you put this much money into a system that delivers this poor an outcome then you have to continue to be honest about the problems and they are structural and they are about our ill health as a nation.
“If we don’t prevent ill health in this country better than we are, then the NHS in itself is not sustainable and that is a terrifying situation.”
The paramedics will ensure the patient is on a trolley, chair or wheelchair.
They will then inform nurses, after the 45 minute window has elapsed, that they are leaving to respond to more life-threatening call-outs or other emergencies.
Mr Streeting said: “The fact that the NHS is having to resort to these desperate measures not only shows the depth of the crisis it is facing, but lays bare the fact that they have no confidence that the Government will step in and fix things.
“The NHS simply doesn’t have the staff it needs to treat patients safely and on time. That’s why we will undertake one of the biggest expansions of the NHS workforce in history, training the staff needed to provide care for patients paid for by abolishing the non-dom tax status.”
The Health Secretary has blamed high numbers of flu cases, Covid-19 and Strep A fears for the particular pressures the NHS faced over Christmas.
Steve Barclay's comments on Tuesday came as senior doctors say the NHS is on a knife edge, with many A&E units struggling to keep up with demand and trusts and ambulance services declaring critical incidents.
Mr Barclay recognised the situation is not acceptable but attributed the "particular pressures" over Christmas to "a surge in flu cases, Covid cases and also a lot of concern around Strep A".
He said: "There's £500 million of investment this year going into tackling the pressure in terms of social care.
"So we're putting more funding in. We've got more clinicians, we've got more staff working in the NHS.”
He added that the Government is focused on freeing up hospital beds and creating more capacity, as that will relieve pressures on A&E and will ensure ambulance handover times are reduced.
But Unison deputy head of health Helga Pile stressed that the "NHS is on its knees like never before".
She added: "The Government's failure to deal with the workforce crisis is at the heart of the problems harming patients every day.
"The Government must stop buck passing. Years of neglect are to blame. The way to begin fixing this mess is an immediate boost to NHS pay to stop skilled staff leaving."
Ambulance staff are set to walk out on January 11 and 23 in a row over pay, while nursing staff will strike on January 18 and 19.
