Sunak’s NHS crisis plan to provide more ambulances, hospital beds and care at home
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak will attempt to reassure voters on Monday that he has a plan to address the NHS emergency care crisis in England, with a blueprint to speed up ambulance response times and cut hospital admissions.
Under the two-year plan, ambulance response times for category two calls, which include suspected strokes and heart attacks, will be kept to an average of 30 minutes over the next year, with further improvement the following year.
This compares with an average ambulance response time of more than 90 minutes during high demand in December, against a standard of 18 minutes.
A total of 800 new ambulances, including 100 specialist vehicles for mental health patients, and 5,000 more hospital beds will be provided, including making some temporary beds opened this winter permanent. The measures will be backed by £1bn in funding, part of an additional £6.6bn for the NHS over the next two years announced in the Autumn Statement.
The plan will also aim to ensure that 76 per cent of patients will wait no longer than four hours to be seen at accident and emergency units by March next year. This compares with just 65 per cent of patients seen within that time in December, when a record 2.2mn people sought help.
Voter concerns about the health service have displaced economic matters as the most mentioned issue facing the country, according to the latest polling by Ipsos, highlighting the peril if the government cannot deliver improvements by the time of the general election expected next year.
Earlier this month, Sunak set a cut to NHS waiting times as one of his five priorities. Describing his “fix” to urgent care as “ambitious and credible”, he said: “It will take time to get there but our plan will cut long waiting times by increasing the number of ambulances, staff and beds, stopping the bottlenecks outside A&E and making sure patients are seen and discharged quickly.”
More urgent care will be provided in the community in an attempt to increase the number treated at home, avoiding hospital. These services will be available for at least 12 hours a day, and officials said they would mean people who had fallen or were injured could get treatment at home within two hours. Such calls would otherwise have required an ambulance.
At the same time, all hospitals with a major A&E department will have same-day emergency care units, staffed by consultants and nurses. Officials said this would allow thousands of people each week to avoid an overnight hospital stay.
One of the biggest problems for the NHS is the number of people who cannot be released from hospital due to a lack of care in the community. The NHS will now pilot a new approach to “step down” care, with some patients receiving rehabilitation and physiotherapy at home.
The plan will also say that up to 50,000 patients a month will benefit from “virtual beds”, with patients supported by staff remotely, by the end of 2023.
NHS chief executive, Amanda Pritchard, who will launch the plan at an A&E department in the north east alongside Sunak and health and social care secretary Steve Barclay, said the NHS had been under more pressure than she had ever known in 25 years in the service.
A long-awaited NHS workforce plan would be published soon “which is a once in a generation opportunity to put the NHS on a sustainable footing”, she added.