Cooper Puts Almost £140m Into Urgent Care Before a Hard Winter
The health secretary says winter “will be more challenging for our NHS this year, after such a heavy summer”, announcing almost £140m for fourteen urgent care schemes in England. The largest single award is £42.1m for Queen’s Hospital in Romford, whose emergency department was built for about 325 patients a day and regularly treats more than twice that.
The detail is in the departmental release rather than the headline. Alongside Romford there is £18.4m over three years for digital work in London emergency departments, £12.9m for same-day emergency care in Nottingham, £12m for an ambulance hub in Shrewsbury, £10m for a new urgent treatment centre at Gorleston and £6.35m for forty additional double-crewed ambulances in the East Midlands. It sits inside almost £2bn of urgent care capital to 2030 and a separate £1.5bn for maintaining the estate. The responses divide along predictable lines but are worth hearing. Yvette Cooper said staff “worked incredibly hard to keep on top of the extra pressure this summer”. The Royal College of Nursing’s England director called the money “just another sticking plaster on a system that is at breaking point”, warning that “the nursing workforce needed to deliver these services goes into winter already running on empty and short of staff”. The shadow health secretary asked where the money is coming from. The health service’s national medical director described flu admissions as the highest he can remember for the time of year.