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THE TORIES are ‘blithely sailing towards an iceberg’ with their plans for the NHS, the President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), Dr Adrian Boyle, warned yesterday.
Dr Boyle warned that the plans proposed by NHS England and the Tory government at the weekend will provide less than half the beds needed, with at least 11,000 more staffed beds required in hospitals across the country.
He was reported as saying: ‘If you just look at the figures, all the indicators of our target performance, 12-hour waits in hospital, are all going the wrong way.
‘If we compare them to what was going on at the same time a year ago, it makes me anxious that we are heading towards a worse winter than we just had.’
He said the Tories are ‘blithely sailing towards an iceberg’, and if this winter is as bad as last, ‘it will break the very people who keep this broken system creaking along.’
In January, the RCEM warned that between 300 and 500 excess deaths occur each week in the UK due to A&E delays.
When asked whether the country is at risk of seeing even higher excess deaths during the coming winter, Dr Boyle said: ‘Yes, actually, I think we are.’
He added that he has ‘little confidence’ that the winter plans will ‘prevent queues of ambulances outside of hospitals, or the shameful sight of patients waiting for hours on trolleys in the corridors in A&Es (that are) full to bursting.’
And he warned that the ‘incentives’ the Tories are proposing to NHS trusts to free up beds will encourage them to ‘game the system to get cash’.
Dr Boyle said: ‘People will start trying to look after and prioritise people who they think they can send home (within four hours) over patients who need admitting.
‘They’ll just accept the patients who need admitting are going to spend longer than four hours … It distorts clinical priorities away from those who aren’t the sickest.
‘This would leave the most vulnerable, typically the elderly and those in a poor mental state, waiting for hours potentially on trolleys in corridors.’
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