It’s been a busy few weeks since the election, setting up my office for the new constituency of Bolton South and Walkden, catching up with constituent casework and meeting with local community groups and businesses. Last week I also met the chief executive of Bolton Hospital alongside our two new Bolton MPs. I know from regular meetings at Bolton Hospital in the past few years that things have been difficult.
The NHS has been facing the worse crisis in its history. When I told ministers in the previous government that patients were being failed on a daily basis, that wasn’t political rhetoric, but the daily reality faced by millions of people. NHS performance is currently well below the levels patients rightly expect.
Recent data shows that 75 per cent of people waited under four hours in A&E, when the target is 95 per cent; only 59 per cent of patients waited under 18 weeks for planned hospital treatment when the target is 92 per cent; and the average ambulance response time to conditions like strokes and heart attacks was over 34 minutes when the standard is 18 minutes. For the last fourteen years as an MP, I have prioritised campaigning on NHS reform and, like so many, I am hopeful about the prospect of our new Labour government delivering the changes that we desperately need to see. Within a month of taking office, we have already negotiated a fair pay deal for junior doctors.
The last government presided over the worst set of strikes in a generation causing delays, chaos, and misery. Now a Labour government is resetting relationships with NHS staff so we can finally start working together to bring down waiting lists and fix the broken NHS. Similarly, GPs with whom I speak regularly in Bolton have told me about the pressure facing their practices and patients who have struggled to get an appointment.
We now have a Labour government that is taking immediate action to hire 1,000 new GPs who would otherwise be unemployed. It's absurd that people can’t book appointments while some GPs can’t find work. This is just the first step in the long-term work of shifting the focus of healthcare out of hospitals and into the community to fix the front door to the NHS.
We need to work with GPs to rebuild our NHS so it’s there for us all of us when we need it. For the first time in over a decade we have a government who is honest about the challenges facing our health and serious about tackling them..
