Urgent and Emergency Care Recovery Plan

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Monday 30th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

In a former role, when I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I signed off a significant expansion of A&E facilities. I hope that reassures my hon. Friend of my commitment to putting more capacity into emergency departments, not least because they need a certain level of capacity to be able to ensure same-day access, triage and ways of getting flow into the system. As for the wider site proposal, clearly the ICB for his area will want to prioritise that.

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

The urgent care and ambulance crisis has been brewing since autumn 2021 in Shropshire, and it has worsened since. Last week, a doctor went on the record to say that the emergency department was “like a war zone” and expressed her fear that, in a fire, not everyone would get out alive. In a six-week period to 12 January, the category 2 response time in the Oswestry area was two hours and 10 minutes. Will the Secretary of State acknowledge that in some areas the crisis is worse than in others? Will he agree to meet me and the other MPs representing Shropshire to discuss how we progress Shropshire further along this track to solve the urgent care crisis that is so serious there?

[Steve Barclay]

I am very happy to meet with the hon. Lady and colleagues to discuss this further. I think most people recognise that, since the huge pressures from flu over the Christmas period, the flu numbers have come down, but of course there is continued pressure in the system.