‘WE HAVE seen nurses spending their entire shifts treating people in car parks because of backed up ambulances, we know the prime minister recognises that there is a crisis in the NHS because she wanted to sack her health secretary last week, but was too weak to do it,’ Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said during Prime Minister’s question time yesterday afternoon.
He asked PM May: ‘If the NHS is so well resourced and so well prepared, why was the decision taken last week to cancel the operations of 55,000 patients during the month of January?’
May responded: ‘Someone from the front bench of the Labour Party said apologise, I have made clear that I have already apologised.’
Corbyn continued: ‘Giving the health secretary a new job title won’t hide the fact that six billion has been cut from social care under the Tories. Part of the problem in the NHS is that its funds are being increasingly siphoned off into private companies including in the health secretary’s area of Surrey where the Clinical Commissioning Group was forced to pay money to Virgin Care because it did not win the contract.
‘Will the Prime Minister assure patients that in 2018 less NHS money intended for patient care will be feathering the nests of share holders in private health companies?’
May responded: ‘On the issue of the private health sector in the National Health Service, under which government was it that private access and private use in the NHS increased? The increase that we have seen in private sector companies working in the health service was under a Labour government.’
Later in Parliament Shadow Secretary of State for Health Jonathan Ashworth moved a motion to force a Commons vote demanding extra cash for the NHS.
He said: ‘Almost exactly a year ago we debated winter pressures on the NHS with a backdrop that had been characterised by the Red Cross as a humanitarian crisis, and here we are a year later again debating a winter crisis which is worse than last year.
‘Since the start of this winter almost 75,000 patients waited in the back of an ambulance. Almost 17,000 patients waited for over an hour.’
‘We have had eight years of sustained underfunding of the NHS at the hand of this government. This winter crisis was entirely predictable and entirely preventable.’
The motion is as follows: ‘That this House expresses concern at the effect on patient care of the closure of 14,000 hospital beds since 2010; records its alarm at there being vacancies for 100,000 posts across the NHS; regrets the decision of the government to reduce social care funding since 2010.
‘This motion notes that hospital trusts have been compelled to delay elective operations because of the government’s failure to allocate adequate resources to the NHS; condemns the privatisation of community health services and calls on the government to increase cash limits for the current year to enable hospitals to resume a full service to the public, including rescheduling elective operations, and to report to the House by oral statement and written report before 1st February 2018 on what steps it is taking to comply with this resolution.’
