Hastings and Rye is the worst performing constituency for ambulance waiting times in the south-east. Data from the South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust reveal that for category 2 patients (including suspected heart attacks and strokes) the response time in Winchelsea is 45 minutes and Rye 42 minutes. This compares with Hastings (28 minutes), Ashford (25 minutes) and the national target of 18 minutes.
What is the solution to this serious problem? Wes Streeting MP, shadow secretary of state for health and social care, visited Hastings ambulance station on Friday, September 22 with Helena Dollimore, Labour’s candidate for Hastings and Rye, to discuss Labour’s plans with staff and GMB representatives.
Mr Streeting paid tribute to hard-working ambulance staff of whom, he felt there simply were not enough, and he linked the pressure on them with the difficulties people experience in getting a GP appointment. Labour is committed, he said, “to the biggest expansion of NHS staff in history.” This would be paid for by £1.6 billion gained from abolishing the tax exemptions enjoyed by non-doms; closing tax loop-holes employed by equity fund-managers would fund mental health services. All Labour manifesto commitments, he said, would be fully costed and funded so that there would be no need to increase the tax burden on low and middle-income earners. Reforms to the NHS would ensure that all this money would be well spent.
When asked about NHS England’s plans, announced last week, to establish three new departments for equality, diversity and inclusion, people and culture and people and communities, at a cost of £13.8 million per annum and involving at least 177 of the staff involved earning at least £50,000 per annum, Mr Streeting repeated Labour’s commitment to fund front-line services.
There were no plans, he indicated, to change the funding of the NHS from the current general taxation model to any of the mixed public / private insurance models used so successfully in countries such as Australia and France. Labour’s reforms would switch the balance of funding from hospitals to primary care in the community. Mr Streeting did not see management tiers in the NHS as ‘bad’ by comparison with ‘good’ front-line practitioners but wanted to see many more of the latter.
Image Credits: Labour Party .