The Ashton-under-Lyne MP and deputy leader of the Labour Party writes about waiting times for emergency care in her latest Tameside Reporter column.

This week I want to talk about the problems facing our magnificent NHS and more specifically, waiting times for emergency care.

The latest figures released by the NHS show that in Tameside, 36 per cent of patients who visited A&E waited more than four hours for treatment, while 833 people faced a wait of more than 12 hours.

Just 64 per cent were seen within four hours which falls staggeringly short of the NHS target of admitting, transferring or discharging 95 per cent of patients within four hours.

A&E departments across the country are facing huge pressures. As Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries admitted, a decade of Conservative mismanagement left the health service ‘wanting and inadequate’ when the pandemic struck.

There are now 6.73 million people on the NHS waiting list in England as of June 2022. This is the highest ever recorded. At the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, following a decade of Tory mismanagement there were 4.4 million people on the NHS waiting list in England, then a record high.

Nationally, the standard of 92 per cent of people seen within 18 weeks of a referral has not been met since 2016. Now, one in every nine people in England are on the NHS waiting list. The NHS went into the latest wave of Covid infections with the longest waiting list ever, understaffed and overstretched.

Patients within my constituency in need of emergency medical attention are forced to wait far too long to be seen, left for hours often in serious pain.

I’m very worried that these delays are putting people off going to A&E who need medical attention. Unacceptable waits will mean people could fall through the cracks.

The Conservative Government’s response to the crisis in A&E is to scrap the zero tolerance for 12 hour waits. At the same time as they are putting up taxes on working people, they are lowering standards for patients. We’re paying more but waiting longer.

Our NHS is crying out for a change in government to give us the fresh start we need but Tory leadership contenders Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are living in a fantasy world where the NHS isn’t worth mentioning. The truth is the health service is facing the biggest crisis in its history, with one in every eight people waiting for care. The Conservative leadership candidates have no plans to even begin to fix this.

Among those 6.7 million on waiting lists, there could be a huge number of undiagnosed conditions like cancer. Record waiting times have a cost in lives. More patients than ever before are left waiting an entire day to be seen for emergency conditions - 24 hours in A&E was just a TV programme, now it’s the reality under the Conservatives.

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