The health secretary has been confronted outside a hospital by a woman who angrily criticised the government for doing “bugger all” to fix record-high ambulance wait times.
During an interview with broadcasters in central London on Thursday afternoon, Steve Barclay was told the Conservatives had had “long enough” to fix the NHS by a visibly angry member of the public.
Gesticulating in frustration, she said that “people have died” while minsters did nothing.
Her brief but punchy remarks echo complaints made about government drift in the weeks since Boris Johnson announced he would leave No 10 in September – sparking accusations of a “zombie government” and compounded further by the two holidays the prime minister has taken since.
The woman, whose identity is not known, strode up to Barclay as he was speaking to journalists after a tour of an operating theatre by surgeons at Moorfields eye hospital.
Off-camera, she was heard asking: “Are you going to do anything about the ambulances waiting and the people dying out?”
A startled Barclay responded “yes, we are”, but was quickly interrupted when she asked the follow-up question: “Well don’t you think 12 years is long enough?”
As the camera panned to film their exchange, Barclay tried to answer, saying “yes, and we are, we’re taking …”. But he was cut short again by the woman, who told him: “Twelve years. You’ve done bugger all about it! People have died, and all you’ve done is nothing.”
After the heated interaction, Barclay said “a range of measures” were being taken to reduce ambulance wait times, including “looking at how we address variation in performance” between trusts, spending more money on 111 and 999 call centres and speeding up people who are able to leave hospital doing so.
“It’s an absolute priority both for the government and for NHS England,” Barclay added.
Despite his assurances, patients are facing “frequent and prolonged” waits for ambulances, a recent report from the Care Quality Commission found.
An 87-year-old man was earlier this month forced to wait 15 hours for an ambulance in a makeshift shelter made out of a garden football goal, umbrellas and pieces of tarpaulin after a fall.
Ambulances were also found to be taking almost an hour to reach patients in England who have had a suspected stroke or heart attack, more than three times the 18-minute maximum wait.
All 10 ambulance services went on their highest form of alert last month amid a heatwave and Covid-related staff absences.
On Friday morning the health secretary announced that more than 50 new surgical hubs will open across England to help reduce Covid backlogs.
The new hubs will provide at least 100 more operating theatres and 1,000 more beds, with the target of delivering almost 2m extra routine operations over the next three years, he said.
The beds will be allocated for planned operations, which the government hopes will reduce the risk of short-notice cancellations.
The new hubs are backed by £1.5bn allocation funding and have been introduced to help cut waiting lists which were made worse by the pandemic.
Barclay said: “In order to bust the Covid backlogs and keep pace with future demands, we can’t simply have business as usual.
“Surgical hubs are a really tangible example of how we are already innovating and expanding capacity to fill surgical gaps right across the country, to boost the number of operations and reduce waiting times for vital procedures.
“We have already made progress in tackling the longest waiting lists to offer patients quicker access to treatment, and these new surgical hubs will in their own right deliver additional operations over the next three years, including over 200,000 this year alone.”
