Health Services: Weather

(asked on 9th November 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the implications for his policies of the findings of the Insight Panel survey by the Royal College of Radiologists on the proportion of doctors who felt unprepared for winter pressures; and what recent steps his Department has taken to help ensure that the NHS is able to cope with the anticipated level of demand for NHS services.


Answered by
Will Quince Portrait
Will Quince
This question was answered on 21st November 2022

No specific assessment will be made. We recognise the pressure the National Health Service (NHS) faces over winter, and we are taking a whole-system approach to ensure people get the care they need, when they need it.

The NHS is maximising recruitment of new staff in primary care through the winter, including care co-ordinators and social prescribing link workers. We made £520 million available to improve access and expand general practice (GP) capacity during the pandemic. This is alongside an investment of at least £1.5 billion on GP capacity in 2020 to create an additional 50 million general practice appointments by 2024, helping people access the primary care they need and avoid unnecessary demand on urgent care and A&E.

The NHS has set out a plan to substantially increase bed capacity and resilience this winter. NHS bed capacity will be increased by the equivalent of at least 7,000 general and acute beds, including a mix of new physical beds and expanding the use of innovative virtual wards to treat patients safely at home. Building on the NHS plan, Our Plan for Patients set out further urgent action, including £500 million for an Adult Social Care Discharge Fund, helping people get out of hospitals quickly, freeing up beds and reducing long waits in A&E.

We are preparing for variants of COVID-19 and seasonal respiratory challenges through delivering an integrated COVID-19 booster and flu vaccination programme, minimising hospital admissions from both viruses.

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