Member

We have seen more than three times as many patients hospitalised with flu this winter compared with last year, in a service with no slack left to give. Since coming into office, the Government have been doing everything we can to prepare the NHS for winter, including by ending the resident doctors’ strikes. This is the first winter in three years when staff are on the front line, not the picket line. The Chancellor made an additional £1.8 billion available in-year to fill the black hole left by the previous Government, and we introduced the new respiratory syncytial virus vaccine to protect more than 1.2 million people against the virus.