Swindon Advertiser Column: We Should Be Very Proud Of The NHS & The People Who Work In It

Most people are well aware of the pressures facing the NHS, with rising patient numbers and the complexities of an ageing population. This is always the busiest time of year for the NHS, and hardworking staff are taking the necessary steps to make sure patients continue to get seen as quickly as possible.

Thankfully, the NHS is better prepared to face these challenges than ever before.

The NHS currently receives record funding, just over £109bn a year, and this has gone up in every single year since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.

To put it into context, that equates to around £1 in every £7 the Government spends.

At the Budget the Chancellor delivered an extra £437 million for NHS services this winter, as well as £1 billion extra social care funding this year. This funding means that in our NHS today, there are an extra 10,600 doctors and over 10,000 more nurses working in our hospitals compared to seven years ago, including 142 more doctors and 420 more nurses at the GWH.

And there needs to be this record investment and increase staffing as we expect more and more from our health system. This is why the overall health budget from 2015 to 2020 is worth over half a trillion pounds.

Over the same seven year period, we’ve seen a huge increase in people visiting hospital with increasingly complex needs - two million more people a year are now treated in hospitals across England today than when I was first elected in 2010.

Despite these pressures, there are more beds available across the system and there has been a reduction in the number of delayed discharges of elderly people who would otherwise have been in NHS beds rather than in social care. More than 1,000 extra beds have been freed up in our NHS, the flu vaccination program has been expanded and there is extended access to GP appointments.

In order to alleviate further some of the pressure on the NHS we need to provide enough information for people to make sure their hospital and GP visits are absolutely necessary, and the impact missed appointments has on the service.

Of course if a person needs emergency treatment they should go to hospital, where they will be treated by our excellent clinicians, but non-urgent and trivial visits take up valuable time and prevent other more urgent cases being seen to.

A&E should only be used for life-threatening conditions and serious injuries. Urgent care and walk in centres can treat minor injuries, such as cuts, sprains and strains, broken bones, minor burns and scalds. Pharmacies can give advice on coughs and colds, and NHS 111 can also provide advice to help you find the most suitable care.

My colleague Robert Buckland MP and I will continue to work with the CCG, the GWH and Local Authority to support the ongoing work to further increase funding, secure new facilities and deliver improvements to adult social care.

We should be very proud of the NHS and the people who work in it. Thanks to them it was recently ranked as the best and safest healthcare system in the world by an independent think tank and we want it to continue to deliver the outstanding care that means patient satisfaction remains at a record high.