I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) on securing this debate and on
her strong and informative opening. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) for her detailed explanation of dentistry. I am acutely aware of the issue but I could not go into all that detail, so I thank her sincerely for that.
Our NHS is not a faceless organisation; it is hundreds of thousands of dedicated workers who look after us. Their commitment is being exploited. Our NHS is the people who work in it, and they need to be, and should be, valued and treasured. This Government should be ashamed of the way the people in our NHS are being exploited. After years of Conservative-led Governments, our national health service is reaching breaking point. We have heard from many Members today about the problems with waiting lists, ambulance times, GP appointments and dental health. We need a national assessment of need, and some kind of national inquiry to get down to how we meet that need.
Things need to change, and change quickly, and I have two points that largely read into issues with GPs and hospitals, although our health service is much bigger. There must be a commitment to look at social care, which must be considered and addressed. Without that, we will never get hospitals right, because most of the beds that are taken up—I hate to say that—but could be freed up, are as a result of problems with social care. We must ensure that the funding we give for social care goes to the funded body.
The relationship between GP surgeries and patients needs to be addressed. We have heard about how many members of the public are illiterate, and they do not have confidence when they go to a surgery to argue their point. I have a case at the moment that is driving me around the bend. It involves a simple admin error—any of us could make an error, so I am not criticising anyone—and it has caused such anxiety to my constituent that I am receiving texts minute by minute. The bureaucracy involved between a GP surgery and a consultant to get something right is unreal. The relationships and training within GP surgeries need to be addressed.
There has been an absolute failure to adopt a long-term plan to recruit doctors, nurses and social care workers—social care needs to be treated as a profession, rather than simply going into a house to provide a bit of care. The crisis has been allowed to reach such a stage that a long-term plan is not enough. Urgent action is needed to tackle the lack of doctors and nurses. There is now no option other than to make it easier for the NHS to recruit doctors and nurses from abroad. There are 130,000 vacancies across the health and care sectors, and there is not enough time to train sufficient people to plug the gap. I respect the quality of the nurses and doctors we recruit from abroad, so I am not doing them down; we have to bring them in because we do not have what we need. We are having to use the private sector to fill the gap, but we should be thinking about our long-term needs. We should be recruiting and training people so that we do not have to keep recruiting from abroad.
The Government have failed to outline anything like a long-term plan for the health service. We need home-grown doctors, nurses and carers, and we need to think about what else we can do. We have lost so many surgeries. Why does the NHS not employ GPs? One of our surgeries in St Helens is run by the NHS. The Government have failed to offer more training places for doctors and nurses, and they have failed to prepare our NHS for the future. The current crisis is putting a
spotlight on the issue, which results from more than a decade of failure to adopt a long-term approach to staffing. Instead of adopting such an approach, each Health Secretary and Prime Minister has wanted to put their own short-term stamp on the NHS. We have had so many Prime Ministers and Health Secretaries in the past couple of years, and each has wanted to put their own stamp on the NHS. Our NHS is too important for that. It is too important not to have a long-term plan for recruitment and retention.
Labour will train 10,000 new nurses every year, and it will double medical school places. Training and recruiting staff is only half the story; the other important half is retention. NHS staff are leaving in droves, and morale is at an all-time low. We would not be able to handle another covid strain, as our NHS is not what it was three years ago because it has been drained and exploited. It is at its lowest ebb.
Keeping well-trained and experienced is staff is vital to delivering a good service to the public. We need to respect their skill and commitment. It costs a lot more to recruit and train new staff than it costs to keep existing staff. For more than a year, the Government clapped nurses on the doorstep, but they refused to give even the 2.5% increase that was already in the Budget, and now they will not sort out a third pay settlement.
If we want our NHS to care for us, we need to care for our NHS. The Government have lost the confidence of our NHS heroes, and that needs to change. Our NHS needs rescuing, and only Labour will do that. I think it is simple. The Government say they have a long-term plan, but Labour will deliver a long-term plan to save the NHS by plugging the staffing shortage with more training places, greater recruitment and better retention. That will give patients the service they deserve, a service for which we will always be thankful.
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