Health Secretary Wes Streeting ‘stunned’ by NHS failings

Wes Streeting said he has been “genuinely stunned” by the NHS failings he has learned about since becoming health secretary.

He said much of what he had been told is not yet in the public domain and he is determined to “tell the truth to our country” about how patients and staff had been failed.

Mr Streeting has ordered an independent investigation into NHS performance in England.

It comes as the latest waiting time figures for the NHS show the backlog for hospital care has gone up again, hitting 7.6 million.

It is the second month in a row the waiting list has gone up, but it is still below the 7.77 million peak recorded in September.

The investigation – led by NHS surgeon and independent peer Lord Ara Darzi – will help inform Mr Streeting’s 10-year plan for the NHS.

He told the BBC that one of the things that had struck him in his first week as the health and social care secretary was that there was “worse to come.”

there were a number of things that are known about the health service and the way in which patients’ safety is treated and how people are held to account for performance that is not yet in the public domain and that there was “more to come.”

He said he would set this out in the coming weeks and the independent investigation would have his support.

He said this was so that “we can spell out really clearly really transparently the scale of the failure in the NHS.”

Mr Streeting also said that they were going to take steps to make sure that senior managers are regulated so that if whistleblowers are silenced by managers, those managers do not work in the NHS anymore.

“That’s how seriously I take that issue, ” he said.

Mr Streeting told The Sun newspaper the NHS could be turned around, but first it was important to diagnose the problem.

“It’s clear to anyone who works in or uses the NHS that it is broken.”

He said during the election campaign he heard from people across the country who had been let down including an 88-year-old woman who fell out of bed and waited three hours for an ambulance and an RAF veteran who has been waiting 15 months for an operation.

It is more than eight years since any of the key waiting time targets for A&E, hospital waiting times or cancer care have been hit in England.

Alongside the backlog, waiting times in A&E and for cancer care are a long-way short of target.

One in four patients waited longer than four hours in A&E in June, while a third of cancer patients did not start treatment within 62 days of a referral.

The publication of the figures comes as the Nuffield Trust think-tank warned progress in reducing NHS waits “stagnated” with long waits remaining “endemic” in the NHS.

Lord Darzi, who acted as an adviser and minister to the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has been asked to report back by September.

NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard welcomed the investigation.

“Frontline NHS staff are doing an incredible job despite the huge pressures, but we know that they face huge struggles and patients are not always getting the timely, high-quality care they need.

“We will work closely with the government, independent experts and NHS staff to take a detailed look at the scale of the challenges and set out plans to address them – this comprehensive analysis will be an important step in helping us to build an NHS fit for the future.”