A Downing Street spokesperson has said that prime minister Rishi Sunak is “confident” the NHS is being provided with the “funding it needs” to get through the ongoing winter crisis.
Questioned over whether the prime minister believes the NHS is getting enough resources, the prime minister’s official spokesperson said: “I think we are confident we are providing the NHS with the funding it needs as we did throughout the pandemic to deal with these issues.
“We have been upfront with the public long in advance of this winter, [ ] because of the pandemic and the pressures it has placed and the backlog of cases that this would be an extremely challenging winter, and that is what we are seeing and we remain thankful to frontline NHS and care staff who are providing this level of care to the public in a challenging time”.
Notably refusing to use the word “crisis”, the spokesperson continued: “This is certainly an unprecedented challenge for the NHS, brought about by a number of factors”.
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The No. 10 spokesperson also dismissed a suggestion that because the prime minister and his family use private healthcare, he was not aware of the problems with the NHS. He described this characterisation as “wholly wrong”.
This comes as former Brexit secretary David Davis set out a five-point plan which he believes could steer the Conservative party to victory at the next general election. One of these points was to get the “NHS back on its feet”.
The one-time candidate for the Conservative leadership told Times Radio: “[Sunak] has got to start to get the NHS back on its feet. There is no doubt, the excess death levels, with delays on conventional treatment, on testing and so on, not just the ambulance delays, the more general delays, we have got to at least start on that, we won’t solve that before the election but the trajectory has got to be in the right direction”.
On Sunday, Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said that between 300 and 500 people were dying every week because of delays in A&E. Speaking to Times Radio, Boyle said: “We went into this December with the worst-ever performance against our target and the highest-ever occupancy levels in hospital.
“We don’t know about the waiting-time figures because they don’t come out for a couple of weeks; I’d be amazed if they’re not the worst ever that we’ve seen over this December”.
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