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16
Jan
Latest A&E waiting time figures at Harrogate hospital a 'scandal', says MP
New NHS figures have shows there were 630 waits of 12 hours or longer at Harrogate District Hospital’s A&E department last month.
It means total of 12.2% of admissions to A&E in December had to wait 12 hours or longer from the time they arrived.
Tom Gordon, the Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, described the figure as a "scandal".
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said long waits in A&E are estimated to have contributed to 14,000 deaths in England in 2023.
Mr Gordon said:
It’s a scandal that these dangerous delays have become normalised here. A&Es are at breaking point after years of the previous Conservative government’s shameful neglect and patients are paying the price.
The new government looks to be asleep at the wheel and has completely failed to get a grip on the winter crisis. We now need to see ministers step up and finally begin to tackle this ongoing disaster.
This response must include an urgent expansion of the number of hospital beds available in Harrogate and Knaresborough and a pandemic-style emergency recruitment campaign to bring staff out of retirement and back into our local health services workforce.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said this week he did not want “corridor care” — patients being treated in corridors — to be normalised.
He added:
I cannot and will not promise that there won’t be patients treated in corridors next year. It will take time to undo the damage that has been done to our NHS, but that is the ambition this government has.
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