The Member of the Welsh Parliament for Aberconwy – Janet Finch-Saunders MS – has today (25 November) urged the Welsh Government to boost the use of Covid-free hospitals across Wales, as a means to ensure that patients’ care pathways are appropriately managed.
Waiting times for those waiting more than 36 weeks have increased by 8 times since the start of the pandemic, with 168,944 people still waiting more than 36 weeks for treatment. Concerningly, it is predicted that up to 2,000 people could die because of COVID-related delays in the Welsh NHS.
The Member was speaking as part of a Welsh Conservative debate on the impact of COVID-19 on health services. You can read a transcript of this debate by clicking here.
Commenting on her contribution today, Janet said:
“I must make it clear that any concerns or criticisms that my constituents and I have are not with those frontline heroes who have so gallantly battled the pandemic, but with the failure of management by this Welsh Labour Government over a sustained period of many years.
“We should be under no illusion about the strain which our health service is under. The 95% target for patients spending less than four hours in A&E had never been met and cancer waiting times had not been met for ten years. In many respects, the present pandemic has worked to only shine a spotlight on the failure of management by twenty years of successive Welsh Labour-led Governments.
“It is why I am calling on the Welsh Government to immediately boost the use of COVID-free hospitals, as recommended by the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. Across the UK, setting up COVID-19 free hospital areas could prevent 6,000 unnecessary COVID-19 related deaths after cancer surgery over the next year
“The Welsh healthcare system is at breaking point and is facing a tsunami of public health problems as a result of delayed treatments. The failure to not use the independent and field hospital capacity consistently has driven pressure to existing hospitals during the second wave. These mistakes cannot be allowed to continue.”
ENDS
Photo: Artur Tumasjan on Unsplash
