We are all aware of, and some of us have even experienced the current challenges in hospital urgent and emergency care departments, from hours spent in an A&E waiting room to anxious waits for an ambulance. At times of pressure like this, the promise of an NHS that is always there for us can feel strained.
This winter has seen the NHS have to cope with an early surge in flu cases on top of Covid. But knowing where the pressure comes from doesn’t make those difficult waits any easier to bear.
Today, together with NHS England, we are setting out our Delivery Plan for Recovering Urgent and Emergency Services. We are clear these proposals must be about more than just getting us through this tough time. We have to break the cycle of a system that comes under strain year after year.
This new plan is one of our three action plans to cut waiting times across different areas of the NHS. Our Elective Recovery Plan is already in action, with the NHS already virtually eliminating two-year waits and reducing 18-month waits by over half in a year. In addition, our upcoming blueprint for improving primary care will help to cut waiting times for GPs.
Our emergency and urgent care recovery plan will work in three ways: by managing the levels of demand on our emergency service and reduce long waiting times; by ensuring more patients are discharged in a timely manner with the right package of care; and by improving transparency allowing us to access better data about what is happening on the front line.
We will support frail elderly patients by further rolling out community service teams to provide assessments, treatment and support to those who urgently need it within two hours. And we will increase the rollout of our high-tech virtual wards, which will support patients while they recover at home under review by a clinical team.
We now have a growing base of evidence that virtual wards are a safe and effective alternative to bedded care, so our ambition is for up to 50,000 people a month to be supported away from hospital wards by 2023/24. We are also working on the technological changes that will drive improvements in NHS 111 services and provide better joined-up care for frail elderly people.
We will speed up safe discharge of patients who are ready to leave hospital, freeing up beds and speeding up handover delays. Part of this is about increasing join-up between the different services involved. And the plan will also see a scale-up of rehabilitation services to support people after stays in hospital, including a set of pilots looking at new delivery models, and increasing capacity in social care for those who need it, including in their homes.
Front-line capacity will be boosted further thanks to new ambulances, including specialist mental health vehicles, and more sustainable hospital beds backed by a £1 billion dedicated fund – all of which will bring down A&E wait times.
To enhance the effort to succeed, our plan sets out clear targets. We are committed to bringing down ambulance response times and A&E wait times over the next year, and further towards pre-pandemic levels thereafter. Achieving these goals will represent one of the largest and most sustained improvements in the history of the NHS. Yet this is not the limit of our ambition.
Underpinning these targets will be an effort to improve transparency and get access to better data about what is happening on the front line. Too much of the debate about A&E and ambulance services is based on anecdotal evidence. I want NHS managers and the wider public to have access to the same facts from the front line, starting with publishing the number of 12-hour waits from the time of arrival in A&E from April.
This revolution in data and technology will provide the foundation for a push to break free from the annual cycle of stresses and strains on the NHS. We will keep growing staff numbers and bring forward a long-term NHS workforce plan later this year. Recognizing that services need to be joined up, we are boosting capacity and staff in social care, supported by up to £2.8 billion next year and £4.7 billion in 2024/25.
Fixing the NHS is no small task but plans like the one we are announcing today are vital. By increasing capacity and modernizing at the same time, we can make the difference people need to see and hold true to that promise of an NHS that is always there for us.
Steve Barclay is Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
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