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The NHS winter crisis and “abysmal” corridor care won’t be fixed immediately under a Labour government, Wes Streeting has admitted.
The shadow health secretary said if his party is voted in, Labour won’t have a “magic wand” but committed to meeting long-missed A&E targets within the next five years.
Speaking at an event held by the Medical Journalists’ Association, Mr Streeting said his party would seek to unblock hospital beds by having NHS budgets funnelled into social care placements so patients could be discharged sooner.
He also warned if he gave into junior doctors’ 35 per cent pay demands, their union – the British Medical Association – would return every year for more.
Mr Streeting told reporters: “If Labour was saying, don’t worry folks, we’re coming in on 5 July if you vote us in – everything’s going to be sorted by Christmas and you’ll be saying thank goodness we’ve got a Labour government.
“[Voters] would not believe us and think we’re just another bunch of politicians who will say anything to win their vote and let them down after the election.
“I think the public can see the depths of the crisis facing the country. Millions of people are still asking ‘Can anyone sort this out?’, such is the lack of trust in politics and politicians.
“I’m being honest with the public that we can’t wave a magic wand and fix everything on day one or fix everything by Christmas, but what we do have is a plan to hit the ground running and a track record.”
The shadow minister did commit to hitting the target for 95 per cent of patients to be seen in A&E within four hours – a target the NHS has not met since the last Labour government.
Last year The Independent revealed a stark warning from doctors that “corridor care” is now “routine practice” in the NHS as hospitals are unable to discharge healthy patients amid spiralling A&E waiting times.
Mr Streeting added “corridor care is not acceptable today and it’s where we are, and it’s an abysmal experience for patients” but he was unable to commit to fixing the issue immediately if Labour is voted into government next month.
A Labour Party representative later confirmed to The Independent the party would not be able to solve corridor care in the “immediate term”.
However, he said there are some immediate solutions Labour would explore if elected, including “reducing delayed discharges by getting the NHS and social care sector to work more closely together”.
Mr Streeting said: “What we do in terms of unblocking our hospital corridors and hospitals generally, many of the solutions lie outside of the hospital. They’re either, stopping people from needing to walk through the front door and it’s helping people to exit out of the exit door faster than they currently do.”
He warned it is a “longer-term challenge” and hopes to introduce cross-party consultation to work on wider social care reform in the future.
Mr Streeting appealed to junior doctors on Sunday to abandon their plans to strike during the general election and reiterated his stance that he would not give in to original demands for a 35 per cent pay rise.
Estimated costs borne by the NHS due to strikes have totalled £3 billion to date.
When asked at the event if it would be cheaper to agree to original union proposals for a 35 per cent uplift in pay, Mr Streeting said: “Only if you don’t imagine they’re going to come back the following year with another 35 per cent. Which any trade union worth their salt would try and do if you were that much of a pushover.”
He said it would be his job, with respect to the British Medical Association, to “champion the interests of the patient” over the provider and “producer interest”.
