A chilling warning from Britain’s most senior A&E doctor: Tory winter plan could kill thousands
Government plans to prepare the NHS for winter have been criticised by the UK’s most senior A&E doctor, who warned that inadequate provision could see thousands of people die needlessly this year.
Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), warned that plans drawn up this week are wholly insufficient, allowing for less than half of the beds needed to cope with the crisis.
He said that at least 11,000 additional staffed beds should be provided at hospitals across the country, while the prime minister has only pledged 5,000.
The NHS will also offer financial rewards to hospitals that hit waiting-time targets, which Dr Boyle said would mean they simply “game” the system and leave the most seriously ill patients waiting the longest.
The senior doctor said vulnerable elderly patients and the mentally ill would be affected most by the government’s poor planning.
He told The Independent: “If you just look at the figures, all the indicators of our target performance, 12-hour waits in hospital, are all going the wrong way. If we compare them to what was going on at the same time a year ago, it makes me anxious that we are heading towards a worse winter than we just had.”
Dr Boyle warned the government that it was “blithely sailing towards an iceberg”, and that if it allows this winter to be as bad as the last, “it will break the very people who keep this broken system creaking along”.
Last winter, more than 500 excess deaths a week were estimated to be linked to long waiting times, with a record number of patients spending more than 12 hours in A&E, as revealed by The Independent.
When asked whether the country was at risk of seeing even higher excess deaths during the coming winter, Dr Boyle said: “Yes, actually, I think we are.”
The winter plans were quietly announced this week, informing hospitals that they could access some of the £150m in capital funding available from the government if they hit targets for 80 per cent of their patients to be seen within four hours.
In addition, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) announced that the NHS would have 5,000 extra hospital beds, 10,000 “virtual beds”, and “traffic control centres” focused on helping hospitals discharge patients into social care.
The 5,000 additional beds were originally promised last winter. However, the RCEM has pointed out that the health service now has 1,841 fewer beds compared with January this year.
Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, said: “Under the Conservatives, a winter crisis in the NHS has become an annual event. 13 years of broken promises and understaffing have run the health service into the ground.
“The government must learn the lessons of last winter, or patients will pay the price … It will fall to the next Labour government to restore the health service. We will deliver the reform and modernisation to ensure the NHS is there for us when we need it once again.”
Dr Boyle said he has “little confidence” that the government’s plan will “prevent queues of ambulances outside of hospitals, or the shameful sight of patients waiting for hours on trolleys in the corridors in A&Es [that are] full to bursting”.
Busy A&E departments meant ambulances were parked outside hospitals for hours last winter
He said that financial incentives for meeting targets are “distasteful”, and that they offer the wrong solutions, “detracting” from the most pressing problems such as hospital discharges and reducing the length of stay.
“People will start trying to look after and prioritise people who they think they can send home [within four hours] over patients who need admitting. They’ll just accept the patients who need admitting are going to spend longer than four hours … It distorts clinical priorities away from those who aren’t the sickest,” said Dr Boyle.
“This would leave the most vulnerable, typically the elderly and those in a poor mental state, waiting for hours potentially on trolleys in corridors.”
Writing for The Independent, the senior medic said the money was likely to flow only to “affluent” areas, because A&E departments in deprived areas tend to struggle more with waiting times.
Adrian Boyle says he is concerned that services in poorer areas will suffer the most
