Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that (a) Dorset County Hospital and (b) associated community services have adequate (i) staffing and (ii) resources for winter 2025-2026.

Both Dorset County Hospital and Dorset Healthcare, as the primary providers of community services in Dorset, have assessed their resource and capacity requirements for the winter period as part of the annual planning process. These take account of the expected impact of surges in seasonally affected conditions and the associated infection prevention and control challenges this presents.

The winter plans are underpinned by robust organisational business continuity plans to maintain services in the event of loss of workforce or service capacity and are aligned to wider system resilience planning across health and social care partners to help manage and mitigate the risks of anticipated increases in demand and acuity expected over this period. System-level plans include provision for surge and escalation responses at times of peak operational pressure.

The Dorset County Hospital has a comprehensive Operational Resilience and Capacity Plan for winter 2025/26, which aligns to NHS England’s Urgent and Emergency Care priorities and forms part of Dorset’s overall system plan.

The Government continues to strengthen the resilience of elective care, including through expanding valuable protected elective capacity, including in surgical hubs and community diagnostic centres.

Nationally we have invested nearly £26 billion in additional funding for supporting both immediate winter capacity and the infrastructure transformation, new surgical hubs, diagnostic scanners, and enhanced digital systems, that will establish the Neighbourhood Health Service and make future winters fundamentally different, building towards our milestone of 92% of patients waiting no longer than 18 weeks for treatment.