NHS is sending POLICE officers to heart attack callouts due to paramedic shortage
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In his first public acknowledgement of the crisis facing the health service since taking office last month, Steve Barclay said ministers face a ‘real sprint’ to prepare the NHS for the months ahead
The NHS is staring down the barrel of one of its worst winters on record with a triple whammy of Covid, flu and the cost of living crisis set to batter understaffed hospitals, the new Health Secretary has warned as it emerged police officers are being sent to ambulance callouts amid a paramedic shortage.
Steve Barclay said ministers face a ‘real sprint’ to prepare the NHS for the months ahead and promised to relax recruitment rules and launch a hiring blitz to get the health service ready for the cold months, when it faces extra pressures.
A surge in coronavirus cases, a particularly bad flu season and poor health among Britons due to soaring food and energy prices are expected to exacerbate the crisis within NHS, he said.
He plans to hire thousands more foreign medics from countries which produce more nurses than they need, including India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
And he said social care could benefit from hiring foreign nurses whose English is not good enough to work in the NHS. The language requirement to work in care homes is lower than in hospitals.
The NHS is short of tens of thousands of nurses and around 6,000 GPs. But the issue in social care is even worse, where there are 105,000 vacancies.
A lack of staff in social care has created a logjam in hospitals because elderly patients cannot be discharged into care homes.
Meanwhile, it emerged today that police officers in England and Wales are being forced to pick up the health service’s workload, with armed officers showing up to treat cardiac arrest patients due to too few paramedics.
Officers in armed response vehicles, who are trained in first aid and defibrillators, are being pulled away from tackling crime to attend cardiac arrest patients because the NHS ‘can’t cope with demand’.
Mr Barclay called for bold decisions to be made now, before Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss are appointed as Prime Minister next month, or it will be ‘too late’ to save struggling hospitals.
The NHS crisis has seen the backlog for routine hospital treatment soar to a record 6.6million and A&E performance plunge to a record low — with more than 700,000 Britons waiting more than 12 hours so far this year.
Health chiefs blame the social care crisis — with too few staff to look after patients ready to be discharged — along with soaring demand, Covid pressures and higher than usual staff absences due to the virus.
Ambulance response times have been hit as a result, as packed hospitals scramble to find beds for 999 patients, leaving ambulances queuing outside hospitals for up to 20 hours.
At the same time, the NHS backlog for routine treatment grew from 6.4million to 6.6million in May, the latest month with data, meaning one in eight people in England are now waiting for elective care, often in pain
Ministers have admitted that the NHS will fail to meet a key deadline to treat all patients who have been waiting for treatment for over two years for routine treatment by July. The number of patients queuing for more than two years, which only started to be logged in April 2021, peaked at nearly 24,000 in January. But 8,028 patients were still queuing by May
Heart attack patients waited more than 50 minutes for an ambulance on average in England last month — nearly triple the NHS target. There were more than 300,000 category two callouts in June
Some 22,034 people had to wait more than 12 hours in A&E departments in England in June from a decision to admit to actually being admitted, NHS England said. The figure is up from 19,053 the previous month, but still below a record of 24,138 in April, which was the highest for any calendar month in records going back to August 2010. The number waiting at least four hours from the decision to admit to admission stood at 130,109 in June, up from 122,768 the previous month. A total of 72% of patients in England were seen within four hours at A&Es last month, down from 73% in May
More in-depth data, published by hospital executives in their own board papers, reveal the true toll was closer to the 34,000 mark over the same timespan. This metric measures the number of 12-hour waits between when a patient arrives at A&E until they are admitted, discharged or transferred. At the worst-affected trusts, just a handful of waits were recorded under the official measure. This includes Liverpool University Hospitals Foundation Trust, which registered 2,667 12-hour waits in its board papers for May but just four in the NHS publication for the same month. And Bedfordshire Hospitals Foundation Trust only reported one 12-hour wait in the routinely-published nation-wide log but stated there were 400 half-day waits in their board papers
Mr Barclay, 50, replaced Sajid Javid who quit last month after questioning the Prime Minister’s integrity and suggesting the Government was no longer ‘competent’ following a string of scandals and controversies.
In his first interview since taking the job, he set out the struggles facing the health service.
He told The Daily Telegraph: ‘We have very real challenges coming down the track in the autumn and winter, and as far as I’m concerned there needs to be a real sprint within Whitehall, and particularly in the Department of Health, to get ready for September.
‘Part of my role is to prepare for reasonable worst case scenarios. Obviously those pressures can come in different forms. It might be you get a bad flu, it may be Covid rates are higher than we would expect or like.
‘There’s an urgency of now to prepare, particularly in areas where there’s a long lead time. The decisions need to happen now, not wait until the autumn — by which time those lead times would put the resolution at too late a stage.’
Highlighting the extent of the challenges facing the health service, Andy Cooke, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, today warned that police were forced to respond to ambulance callers.
He told The Independent: ‘The ambulance service contacted the police to say “we’ve got this heart patient and we haven’t got anyone to send”.
‘Being first, last and only resort, the police will go. It’s right that they did go but that hides the problems we’ve got in the rest of the system.’
One officer, speaking anonymously, told the newspaper his force was regularly responding to paramedic callers.
Chief Constable Olivia Pinkney, the national lead for local policing, warned officers are being forced to sacrifice fighting crime and make decisions ‘they are not best placed to make’.
The police ‘should not be the service of first resort in these situations’, she said.
The Health Secretary said he has attended meetings on ‘how we prepare for pressures across Government’ in the winter months, including a surge in NHS patients.
Despite the latest Covid wave retreating — with cases plunging by a fifth last week — the NHS is expected to see another spike this winter, as Britons spend more time socialising indoors, where it is easier for the virus to spread.
Experts have said the rise should be no worse than previous waves seen this year, as long as Omicron remains the dominant strain.
But any increase in coronavirus hospitalisations would coincide with an expected onslaught in flu cases. The seasonal virus retreated over the last two years, as measures brought in to control Covid had knock-on effects for other viruses.
Health officials have warned of an ‘early influenza wave’ after Australia — which is currently in its winter — suffered an unprecedented early and fast outbreak across all age groups.
On top of Covid and flu, the cost of living crisis is worsening the public’s health. A survey of 2,000 Britons earlier this year found more than half reported that their health had worsened amid spiralling bills. Eight in 10 blamed rising heating costs, while three-quarters pointed to soaring food costs.
These charts, based on NHS workforce data, show the proportion of doctors and nurses joining the NHS in England based on where they originally trained. In both professions the number of UK trained joiners has decreased over time (red lines) whereas the number of non-EU trained professionals has increased (yellow lines). The proportion of EU professionals joining the NHS has declined over time, taking a sharp dive in the years after the 2016 Brexit vote
India and Pakistan are two largest non-UK countries that doctors currently registered to work in Britain originally trained in with about 30,000 and 17,000 respectively. This is followed by Nigeria, Egypt , Ireland, South Africa, Greece, Sudan, Italy, and Romania
This graph shows the country of training of all newly registered nurses and midwives in the UK over the past five years. Unsurprisingly, British trained nurses make the majority with about 120,000 joiners. India (about 21,000), Philippines (nearly 18,000) and Nigeria (nearly 5,000) are the biggest providers of overseas trained nurses and midwives registered to work in the UK
And medics have warned that patients have been left unable to afford travelling to hospital for vital treatment.
The Health Secretary also set out how decisions would come ‘much more quickly’ under his leadership and he would encourage NHS chiefs to take bolder action to deal with pressures.
He called for a fresh recruitment drive of thousands of foreign medics, especially from India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines which have more nurses than they need, in the coming months to meet soaring demand.
The Government should ‘work at pace’ to ‘significantly increase’ the number doctors from oversees, Mr Barclay said.
His comments come amid fresh concern about the UK’s reliance on foreign medics. BBC analysis of NHS Digital figures show the proportion of NHS medics recruited from abroad nearly doubled between 2014 and 2021.
One third of doctors recruited by the health service in 2021 came from overseas, compared to just 18 per cent in 2014.
Meanwhile, the share of UK doctors fell from 69 to 58 per cent between 2015 and 2021, while the proportion of British nurses fell from 74 to 61 per cent over the same period.
But Mr Barclay called for more foreign recruits, especially into social care. He warned ambulance handover delays ‘manifests itself with unmet need in the community’.
He has set up a group in the Department of Health to work ‘at pace’ to see ‘what is the scope of the opportunity’.
He said ‘significantly’ increasing international recruitment is one lever that could address the problems.
Mr Barclay added: ‘We don’t want people delayed on the ward — that is a bad outcome.
‘A big part of my focus has been giving a lot more ministerial time to looking at the issues on delayed discharge, on social care recruitment. If there’s pressure on the system and that requires more beds in the community, those beds need the workforce to go with them.’
Meanwhile, Mr Barclay described his longer term vision to ease pressure on the health service.
He called for family doctors’ workloads to be reduced — a reason cited by GPs for leaving the profession, reducing hours and retiring early.
Mr Barclay suggested that patients could book blood pressure checks through the NHS app, which would then be performed by pharmacists.
‘Not everything a GP is currently being asked to do needs to be done by a GP,’ he said.
Rishi Sunak, who is vying to be the next Prime Minister, last week called for £10 fines for repeat offenders who miss their GP appointments.
In response to the proposal, Mr Barclay said it is essential to understand the cause of missed appointments and ‘shine a light on that’.
The Health Secretary also called for hospitals use new technology and data to become more efficient and get rid of middle-management.
He has already ordered a ‘digital mapping’ of the NHS workforce to spot where members non-frontline staff are performing the same tasks.
Instead, there should be a hiring spree of data and software engineers and ‘fewer people filling out spreadsheets and communicating in emails in traditional ways’, Mr Barclay said.
It comes as Covid cases are rapidly collapsing in England.
Latest estimates from the Office for National Statistics show 2.1million people were infected on any given day in the week to July 26 (one in 25). This was down 20 per cent on the 2.6million logged the previous week.
Mr Barclay said he was confident the strictest Covid rules — such as ordering businesses to close and people to stay at home — are confined to the darkest days of the pandemic. Although, he did not rule out reintroducing curbs.
He said: ‘We’ve got over 10,000 cases in hospital at the moment, around a third of those are people in hospital because of Covid.
‘So there’s still a significant number, notwithstanding it’s summer and infections tend to spread more clearly in winter.’
However, he noted that the vaccine rollout and ‘huge amount of knowledge’ means the UK is in a ‘very different situation to when a consideration of lockdowns was taking place’.