Hewitt: NHS now takes winter in its stride
Patricia Hewitt welcomes NHS's ability to deal with pressures of winter
Monday, 27, Mar 2006 12:00
New NHS services have helped relieve the winter pressure on the health service to ensure there should be no repeat of the 1999-2000 crisis in the future, Patricia Hewitt said today.
The health secretary said that despite Britain having one of the coldest winters in recent years, NHS staff had delivered a "consistent level of service" throughout.
This was final proof, she said, that lessons had been learned from the crisis six years ago, when a major flu outbreak saw operations cancelled, A&E departments overloaded and an increase in deaths that forced at least one trust to use a cold storage lorry as a morgue.
Since then, a national campaign has seen the uptake of the free flu vaccine increase this year to 75.3 per cent of people over the age of 65, and increased capacity has been provided by an expansion in walk-in centres.
NHS Direct has also been introduced, and the service took a record number of calls over the four-day Christmas weekend, while visits to the website over the festive period were up 32 per cent on the previous year.
As a result, Ms Hewitt said the four-hour target for treatment in A&E had largely been maintained through last April to December.
"In recent years we have said that winter has been handled as part of the NHS's everyday business and this report cements that," she said.
"By looking back at one of the worst winters experienced by the NHS in recent years, we can see how hard NHS staff have worked to deliver a consistent level of service to patients throughout the year and in particular throughout this severe winter."
Today's report is one of the first bits of good news the health secretary has had in months, as NHS trusts across the country shed jobs in an attempt to deal with mounting deficits that critics say are due to the government's reforms.
She admitted as much, saying: "This performance is even more of an achievement when set against an increased demand for services and an NHS that is working harder than ever to manage its finances and implement further reform and improvements."
However, today's report is unlikely to ease the pressure on ministers to prove how record investment has improved the health service, particularly as a former top Department of Health official yesterday warned patients were still not receiving value for money.
Bob Dredge, the former programme director for financial reform at the department, told Panorama that too much of the extra funding had gone into higher staff salaries, rather than patient care.
His comments came after a week of headline-grabbing NHS staff cuts across the country, but yesterday Ms Hewitt insisted the suggestion that these were indicative of the state of the health service everywhere was "complete nonsense".
"I just wish we’d had a fraction of the headlines for the 200,000 or so staff that we’ve actually taken on in the NHS over the last eight years," she told Sunday AM.
"And when the figures come out for the last 12 months we will see further increases, I suspect over about 30,000 more staff in the NHS, which is why we’re able to treat so many more patients and save so many more lives than we were doing before."