Yahoo News Starmer vows to ‘personally monitor’ NHS children’s waiting list
Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to “personally monitor” NHS treatment delays for children if he becomes prime minister, amid warnings that more than 18,000 have waited a year for treatment.
The Labour leader said healthcare chiefs would be ordered to prioritise bringing down “dangerous and damaging” waits for children, eliminating all periods waiting for treatment of more than 18 weeks.
Official figures show more than 180,000 children in England waiting at least 18 weeks for treatment, including 18,632 waiting more than a year.
The data show that waits for children are growing even more quickly than those for adults. The list for children has risen by 37 per cent in two years, with more than 400,000 waits. Meanwhile, that for adults rose by 29 per cent, to a total of 7.7 million cases.
Sir Keir said: “When children are waiting over a year for treatment, that is dangerous and damaging for their long-term health. Children waiting for huge proportions of their life for hospital treatment is heartbreaking, causes immense stress for their parents, presses pause on family life, and they need to end.
“The biggest casualty of the short-term ‘sticking plaster’ politics of the last 14 years are our nation’s children. My Labour government will turn this trend around, and I will personally monitor the speed at which we do.”
Launching Labour’s Child Health Action Plan at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, Sir Keir accused the Conservatives of going in “completely the wrong direction” on children’s health.
The plan promises supervised toothbrushing of three to five-year-olds in the areas with the worst dental decay, breakfast clubs in all schools, a 9pm watershed for junk food adverts and a ban on vape adverts aimed at children.
Labour has also pledged to train thousands more health visitors to administer vaccines at home in order to boost rates of jabs such as MMR.
Sir Keir said his party was happy to be accused of planning nanny state interventions, accusing the Government of the “neglect” of a generation.
“I know that we need to take on this question of the nanny state. The moment you say you want to do anything on child health, people say you’re going to have a load of nanny state. We want to have that fight,” he added.
Dr Sarah Clarke, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “The RCP welcomes Labour’s prevention-first approach to improving the health of future generations.
“Good health starts in childhood. With 9.1 million people in England projected to be living with major illness by 2040, inaction on increasing rates of ill health will be catastrophic for our health service.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “Cutting waiting lists is one of the Government’s top five priorities, and we’re taking action to ensure no child has to wait longer than necessary for treatment.”
Andrea Leadsom, the minister for public health, said: “Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party can make as many promises as they want about the NHS waiting lists, but the reality is that in Labour-run Wales – Sir Keir’s ‘blueprint’ for the UK – they have the longest hospital waits in Britain.
They have failed on this issue in Wales, and they would fail on this issue in England.”
