The Prime Minister’s spokesperson claims the NHS has everything it needs to deal with current pressures.
Downing Street has been branded “delusional” after denying the NHS is currently in crisis.
During a Downing Street briefing yesterday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s official spokesperson said they disagreed when questioned on if the health service in England was in crisis.
They said, “This is certainly an unprecedented challenge for the NHS, brought about by a number of factors, most significantly the global pandemic.
“We are confident we are providing the NHS with the funding it needs, as we did throughout the pandemic, to deal with these issues.”
It comes after a large number of NHS trusts across England declared critical incidents during the festive period, with some reporting hospitals running out of oxygen and A&E waits of up to two days.
Critical incidents.
Doctors are warning problems accessing NHS urgent and emergency services could be causing as many as 500 avoidable deaths a week.
The Downing Street spokesperson blamed the pandemic for delays patients were seeing.
“For a number of people seeking to access the NHS this winter it will be very difficult, because of some of these huge challenges that the pandemic in particular has forced upon us.”
They went on to defend the government, claiming they had correctly prepared for a difficult winter.
“What I’m saying is that we recognised well in advance that this would be a challenging winter, and we have sought to put in place a number of measures to mitigate these challenges”, they explained.
Figures suggest the NHS in England is short of around 130,000 workers, including a record 40,000 registered nurses.
Delusional.
The British Medical Association (BMA) has branded the spokesperson’s comments as “delusional”.
Dr Vishal Sharma, the chair of the consultants committee responded, “For staff working in the NHS or any patients desperately trying to access care, No 10’s refusal to admit that the NHS is in crisis will seem simply delusional.
“To try to reassure us that ministers are confident the NHS has all the funding it needs, at a time when families are seeing relatives left in pain at home or on trolleys in hospital, is taking the public for fools.
“Moreover, the attempt to portray this winter’s crisis as the result of the pandemic and not the result of more than a decade of political choices to reduce investment in the NHS and its workforce is little more than an attempt to rewrite history,” Dr Sharma added.
