First Minister accused of being complacent about A&E pressures
Emily Price
The first minister has been accused of being “complacent” about the pressures faced by A&E departments after she gave out chocolates to staff at hospitals during a surge in demand.
On the Senedd’s first day back after the winter break, leader of the opposition Darren Millar quizzed Eluned Morgan on extensive hospital handover delays.
The Welsh Ambulance Service was forced declare a critical incident last week when more than 340 emergency 999 calls were left waiting to be answered.
Chocolates
After the incident was stood down, Baroness Morgan posted photos of herself online handing out boxes of chocolates to A&E staff at six Welsh hospitals.
She said she had made the visits unannounced because she wanted to see the “raw, unfiltered” reality of what other people experience.
Mr Millar said health professionals and the people of Wales wanted “quality services, not Quality Street”.
Speaking in the Senedd during FMQs, he said front line workers were “fed up” of working under “unacceptable levels of pressure” and “letting patients down”.
Patient flow
The FM argued that the situation facing the NHS was due to a lack of patient flow through hospitals.
She said: “You’ve got very many elderly people coming in with respiratory issues and they can’t be discharged because there’s nobody there to provide the packages of care.
“During Christmas, when lots of people are off, that is more difficult to provide those packages of care.”
The Welsh Conservatives filmed shocking footage outside the Grange Hospital in Cwmbran at the weekend which showed a sea of ambulances unable to offload sick patients.
Baroness Morgan said the Welsh Ambulance Service received an additional 3.6 per cent this financial year which was used to recruit additional clinicians on help desks to help relieve backlogs.
But Mr Millar said “simply throwing money at the problem isn’t going to solve it.”
Backlogs
Speaking to the FM during Plenary, he said: “When you talk about the issues with patient flow, much of this has been created, the problem in our national health service, by you and your predecessors.
“Since 2010, the number of beds in the Welsh NHS has fallen by over 20 per cent – you’ve promised since then to build more hospitals with more beds, but you haven’t delivered.
“In recent years, the number of beds in the Welsh NHS has been completely static, we have a Welsh ambulance service that is effectively dealing with a critical incident every single day of the year.
“It’s been about 14 months since the last extraordinary incident was declared, and yet we see no change.”
Bed
Baroness Morgan hit back at the Tory politician saying he doesn’t understand the issue.
She said: “There’s a lot of people in beds who shouldn’t be there. It’s about flow. It’s about making sure that we have that additional funding that now we have, after 14 years of austerity, to put into the NHS.
“The key issue here is there are lots of people in hospital today who have been clinically optimised, they’ve been sorted out and they need to go home.
“But, the real issue is that we need to sort out social care, and a huge amount of work is being done on that by the health minister; we had that 50-day challenge where we worked out exactly, ‘What is the reason they’re still here?’, ‘Why are they still here?’. It’s not all about beds.”
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Wasn’t she Health Minister? Patient flow and health/social services relations have been an issue for decades. It is not rocket science. The only time it got near working was when we had coterminous boundaries for Health Authorities and Local Authorities, and a thing in London called the DHSS. That was in 1974. A major review of NHS Wales was announced in the autumn. We need to see some bold and dynamic reforms put into place very quickly. Recruiting more staff does not bring expertise or experience, just more paper pushing within a broken service. The whole system needs a massive… Read more »
“She said: “You’ve got very many elderly people coming in with respiratory issues”
You’re about to get a hell of a lot more as a result of Sister Rachel’s parsimonious butchering of the Winter Fuel Allowance. This “joined up polices at both ends of the M4” eh, really working out?
My question to Morgan would be ‘why haven’t you sorted out the ‘flow’ problem during the past 25 years’. She talks as if the problems with social care availability are nothing to do with the Labour government in Wales. As if.
Health services were in crisis well before the influx of winter ailments. What I see is a long running policy of managed decline (what Starmer accused the Civil Service of) with complementary attempts at managed expectations. After all, there is on the other side of the Channel a multitude of hospitals that could potentially be engaged to ease some of the backlog…jf the political desire was actually there that is ?
Under the blinding spotlight of an election campaign, her glaring mediocrity—especially when stacked up against Rhun—will be as obvious as a clown at a funeral. Honestly, how she landed the job is one of life’s great mysteries—right up there with crop circles and why printers never work when you’re in a rush. Creative solutions? She wouldn’t recognize one if it hit her over the head with a Quality Street tin. Speaking of which, endless photo ops with chocolates aren’t going to fix anything—unless the plan is to bribe voters with toffee pennies. And what about Jeremy Miles? Did he accidentally… Read more »
I know the NHS gets a bad press but nobody seems to mention that there are many amazing things that have improved over the past 25 years. People are surviving conditions that 25 years ago would have naturally removed them from any list. Take Cardiac conditions for example. Having a Myocardial Infarction and being given a stent is now an everyday occurrence often resulting in people surviving to live a good active life. But unfortunately we all have to die so the down side of these successes is that we have an increasing aging population that have chronic ‘expensive’ conditions.… Read more »
This isn’t restricted to Welsh hospitals. I was in Hereford County Hospital yesterday and the A & E was overwhelmed there too. Admissions by ambulance were being placed in spare treatment rooms in the Oxford Sweet for out patients. The person I was there to see told me it’s happened a few times this winter.
I could have sworn we had a ‘conversation’ hd !
You mean on here?. We’ve had a few about the defective Barrenness of Cardiff West. I’m hoping to write about effective Eluned but that’s probably some mirage that pops up on a bright sunny day when we’re all optimistic !
Like most other MS she just hopes the problem will go away. Not impressed by her leadership.