Wes Streeting

We will shortly set out our emergency care improvement plan so that we can deliver the year-on-year improvements that people deserve. The long waiting times, not just in emergency departments but in ambulance response times and across the entire system, are completely unacceptable. I refuse to use terms such as “temporary escalation spaces” to describe the true grim reality of corridor care. That is a shameful situation, and I am genuinely sorry that patients are being treated in those conditions and that staff have to suffer the moral injury of working in those conditions. From the moment we came into government, we have worked to ensure that we got through the winter as well as we could. That is reflected in the fact that, despite the winter pressures, waiting lists fell five months in a row throughout the winter. On the targets and standards challenge set out by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, ahead of the winter I was very clear with frontline leaders that patient safety must come ahead of performance targets—particularly the four-hour target—but the 12-hour target is absolutely related to patient safety, as I think the royal college would agree. We must work together to get waits of longer than 12 hours down as a priority, because those waits are directly linked to safety and patient outcomes.