Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt must heed expert's dire warnings
IF the Health Secretary remains in any doubt about the scale of the crisis looming over emergency healthcare this winter he is about to have his illusions shattered.
No less an authority than Dr Cliff Mann, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, will deliver a dire warning when he meets Jeremy Hunt this week.
Unless the Government takes further action to plug gaps in emergency healthcare provision, the effect on England’s A&E departments could be catastrophic.
Dr Mann warns that patients could die of “toxic overcrowding” as the seasonal numbers spike exacerbates a crisis caused by the chronic shortage of consultants and cuts in out-of-hours GP care.
With dangerous complacency, NHS England, the quango running the health service, describes our A&E units as the nation’s “safety net” which enjoy total “public trust”.
The grim reality is most of us now fear an accident which could leave us exposed to agonising hours waiting in a war zone A&E unit for treatment at the hands of exhausted and overstretched staff.
The quangocrats have not woken up to the scale of the crisis confronting them. We can only hope the Health Secretary is more alert to the dangers we could all face in A&E units this winter.