NHS front-line services are already under as much pressure as they usually face in the winter, due to a lack of staff and the inability of hospitals to discharge patients, the head of the service said on Wednesday. sanitary ware.
In a speech to senior health service executives, NHS England Executive Director Amanda Pritchard admitted that the cuts in the number of beds had gone too far. But he blamed social care difficulties for hospitals for not being able to accommodate the growing number of seriously ill people in urgent need of care and patients who were trapped in the back of ambulances outside A&E units. .
However, Health Secretary Sajid Javid warned that there would be “no quick fix” for the increasingly acute problems facing the NHS’s urgent care and emergency services. And he made it clear that the service would have to face its many challenges without any new cash boost.
“Frankly, the situation we are seeing right now in the emergency departments and ambulance services is as difficult as any winter before the pandemic,” Pritchard told delegates at the NHS ConfedExpo conference in Liverpool.
While the growing need for care is one of the key causes of pressure on the NHS, “demand is not the whole story.” But he noted the inadequacy of the provision of social care as the main reason why hospitals have so many patients who cannot be discharged, even though they are medically fit to leave, and therefore so many patients have to be discharged. to wait so long to get a bed.
“You can track the line from delayed downloads, to A&E overcrowding, to slower ambulance response times,” Pritchard said.
The NHS has had fewer hospital beds for many years than comparable countries, which in some ways demonstrates how efficient it is, he added. But hospital struggles show that “we’ve gotten over the point where this efficiency is really inefficient.”
The service has already installed 53 “virtual rooms” – in which patients are cared for at home, to free hospital beds – but these initiatives alone are not enough, he added.
Last month, Mark Docherty, the director of nursing for the West Midlands Ambulance Service, said patients “die every day” because so many ambulances are tied up outside hospitals. Serious patient safety incidents caused by delays have quadrupled in the past year, he added.
In a harsh message to delegates, Javid told them to make better use of the record funding the NHS is receiving, not to expect any increases, and instead to modernize its operation.
“The answer to all the challenges we face in healthcare cannot always be more money. I think it is essential to improve productivity.
“I don’t want my children, anyone’s children, to grow up in a country where more than half of public spending is on health care at all costs, from education to housing.”
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He urged the NHS to carry out major reform, saying: “It is possible to love the NHS and still demand change.” The service must “reduce demand through prevention, early diagnosis and more effective care” and “improve the use of capital, skills, management, data and innovative care models.”
Prior to the opening of the conference, Matthew Taylor, the executive director of the NHS Confederation, had blamed the growing inability of the service to meet the waiting times for attention to the lack of funding during the 12 years since the Conservatives came to power in 2010 and accused Javid of “attacking the director.”
“When you have been in government for 12 years, recognizing the scale of the problems that exist now, problems that clearly reflect the decisions made during those 12 years, is a difficult thing to do politically,” said Taylor, a former head of No 10 under Tony Blair.