YP Comment: No solutions to NHS headache. Angry PMQs offers few answers

However the problems facing the National Health Service won’t be cured by the latest unedifying exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions when Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May traded statistics and insults in equal measure instead of putting forward real remedies of their own.

While the Prime Minister is right to say strong public services require a strong economy, and correct to point out the Mid Staffs scandal happened under Labour’s watch, it would be remiss not to scrutinise some of Mrs May’s answers – she, after all, is the current guardian of the NHS.

The first was the Tory leader’s attempt to trumpet an increase in the number of patients using A&E in recent years as a positive – a situation far from being celebrated by patients waiting hours on trolleys for treatment as hospitals become desperate to redirect the less seriously-ill away from the doors of emergency units.

Mrs May also began one answer by praising the reduction of hospital beds across the country, the justification being advances in medicine mean that many patients can be discharged sooner.

Yet she cannot escape the fact that unprecedented pressures on A&E are exacerbating the shortage of beds and no government, past or present, seems to be taking sufficient account – despite the ongoing work of local NHS transformation plans – of the country’s changing health needs as a direct result of an ageing population.

If only Mrs May and Mr Corbyn could watch these exchanges from a patient’s perspective. The problems facing the NHS should not be so partisan when neither side can claim the moral high ground given past and current failings. This should be about patients’ lives rather than a contest to see who can shout the loudest.