NHS beds crisis rocks May’s backyard
NHS overcrowding has hit Theresa May’s own constituency – with the number of hospital bed demand surging by 13% in seven years.
Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth analysed figures for the first quarter of 2018 across Cabinet members’ constituencies and compared them with the same period in 2011 – under the Tory/Lib Dem coalition.
Buckinghamshire NHS Trust on the Prime Minister’s Maidenhead patch registered dangerously high bed occupancy of nearly 93%, up from under 80% in 2011. The recommended safe level is 85%.
She topped the table along with her deputy, Cabinet Office minister David Lidington. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt actually saw a 1.2% improvement in Royal Surrey County Hospital Trust – but every other Cabinet minister examined other than Tory chairman Brandon Lewis had an increase in hospital bed occupancy in their backyard.
Mr Ashworth said: “These figures show reforms by the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government were the biggest disaster in the NHS’s 70-year history. It’s a failed experiment and patients have suffered as a result of these dangerous reforms.”
In 2017, 2.5 million people waited over four hours in A&E, up from 350,000 eight years ago.
Despite the pressure on the NHS’s 128,400 hospital beds, there are now 16,000 fewer of them than in 2010.
Yet 82 wards have been mothballed because of a lack of funds.