The Liberal Democrats have set out a £1.5bn plan to give patients in England a legal right to be admitted or referred for treatment within 12 hours of arriving at A&E, to end what they have called a “deadly corridor crisis”.In a speech, party leader Sir Ed Davey called for a new legal duty to limit the time patients wait to be admitted, transferred or discharged after arriving in A&E.The Lib Dems say their plan would be funded by scrapping a UK-US pharmaceuticals deal, which could see the NHS pay billions more for drugs.The Department of Health and Social Care said the government had invested an extra £26bn in the NHS and argued it would “take time to turn around the mess we inherited”.The number of patients waiting more than 12 hours for admission to A&E has increased substantially since the pandemic in 2021.The latest NHS figures from November show 50,648 people in England waited more than 12 hours following a decision to admit them to hospital.There were an estimated 16,644 excess deaths associated with long A&E waits before admission in England in 2024, according to analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.Sir Ed said: “This deadly corridor crisis isn’t befitting of the heroic doctors, nurses and other health professionals who work in our NHS.”It’s not what we expect from our NHS, and it’s not what we pay our hard-earned money in taxes to fund our NHS for.”The Lib Dems say they will raise £1.5bn from cancelling the planned medicines deal the UK government agreed with President Donald Trump’s US administration last year.The agreement keeps American imports of UK medicines tariff-free for three years in return for the NHS raising its threshold for spending on new treatments by 25%.In December, the Financial Tim …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnThe Liberal Democrats have set out a £1.5bn plan to give patients in England a legal right to be admitted or referred for treatment within 12 hours of arriving at A&E, to end what they have called a “deadly corridor crisis”.In a speech, party leader Sir Ed Davey called for a new legal duty to limit the time patients wait to be admitted, transferred or discharged after arriving in A&E.The Lib Dems say their plan would be funded by scrapping a UK-US pharmaceuticals deal, which could see the NHS pay billions more for drugs.The Department of Health and Social Care said the government had invested an extra £26bn in the NHS and argued it would “take time to turn around the mess we inherited”.The number of patients waiting more than 12 hours for admission to A&E has increased substantially since the pandemic in 2021.The latest NHS figures from November show 50,648 people in England waited more than 12 hours following a decision to admit them to hospital.There were an estimated 16,644 excess deaths associated with long A&E waits before admission in England in 2024, according to analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.Sir Ed said: “This deadly corridor crisis isn’t befitting of the heroic doctors, nurses and other health professionals who work in our NHS.”It’s not what we expect from our NHS, and it’s not what we pay our hard-earned money in taxes to fund our NHS for.”The Lib Dems say they will raise £1.5bn from cancelling the planned medicines deal the UK government agreed with President Donald Trump’s US administration last year.The agreement keeps American imports of UK medicines tariff-free for three years in return for the NHS raising its threshold for spending on new treatments by 25%.In December, the Financial Tim …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
