Andy Burnham: NHS in Yorkshire faces bleak winter as Cameron’s cuts hit poorest hardest

This year, there are fears that Ministers will break with rules that see areas with the greatest health inequalities get the money they need. What’s worse, it will be handed to parts of the country where life expectancy is already the longest.

Under the plans, large parts of Leeds would lose £150 for every man woman and child, while Hampshire gains £165. Similarly, Calderdale loses £120 per person so that Windsor can gain £120 for every patient.

We would see GP opening hours cut back, treatments restricted to save money and more NHS walk-in centres forced to close down.

It is nothing short of immoral to raid NHS funding of these communities to give it to more affluent areas. That is why Labour MPs in Yorkshire are leading a campaign to oppose this pernicious shift.

Yorkshire’s hospitals are already being hit hardest too. Figures out last week showed that another 120 nursing jobs had been lost in the region in a single month, now totalling over 1,800 since David Cameron entered Downing Street.

That’s over a quarter of all nurse posts axed across England.

Report after report has warned the Prime Minister of the central importance of nurse numbers in providing safe care. But these figures show he is ignoring the warnings and allowing hospitals across England to operate without safe staffing levels.

They make a mockery of everything the Government tried to claim about hospital staffing levels last week.

Things are heading in the wrong direction and the NHS simply cannot continue to take nursing cuts on this scale. For three years we’ve been telling Ministers that nurse numbers were falling, but they ignored the warnings. This winter the Government has left the NHS facing an A&E crisis with thousands fewer nurses.

Winter has barely begun but there’s clear evidence that hospitals across Yorkshire are on the brink of the most dangerous winter in years.

This year, A&Es have gone steadily downhill as a result of the mix of cuts and reorganisation in the NHS. Ministers closed a quarter of NHS walk-in centres across the country – including those in Barnsley and Leeds – and left people without alternatives to A&E.

The destruction of NHS Direct – a trusted, national service – is one of the worst acts of vandalism by this government.

Nurses have been replaced by computers that send people to accident and emergency when they don’t need to be there. Right now, there are thousands of people waiting hours to be seen, stuck on trolleys in corridors or held in the back of ambulances queueing outside A&E.

David Cameron’s severe cuts to home care services have left elderly people without adequate support at home and too many drifting towards A&E. Once admitted, a growing number are trapped on wards because they can’t be discharged.

But, even with this growing chaos threatening to engulf England’s accident and emergency departments, Ministers are ploughing on with plans to close or downgrade them.

This will send a chill wind through those Yorkshire communities that fear losing 
their A&Es.

Why on earth are Ministers closing so many when we are in the middle of the worst A&E crisis for many years?

It is clear that the Government’s recent NHS reorganisation left it weakened and in a worse position to deal with a dangerous winter.

It was a monumental mistake for David Cameron to siphon £350m out of the NHS frontline in Yorkshire – over £3bn across the country – and throw the whole system into chaos with a reorganisation that gave six-figure payoffs to managers and P45s to nurses. Nobody wanted it and nobody voted for it – millions pleaded with the Prime Minister not to proceed.

David Cameron’s decision to break his pledge of “no top-down reorganisation” was a monumental misjudgement.

It pulled the rug from under the NHS when it most needed stability. It is yet more proof that you cannot trust the Tories with the NHS.

The Prime Minister’s fingerprints are all over the A&E crisis too, but his response so far is ‘crisis, what crisis?’. The NHS urgently needs him to snap out of this complacency.

Before the election, he invited the public to judge him by how he treated the NHS. David Cameron used the NHS to take the keys to Downing Street. My mission is to ensure his betrayal of it makes him hand them back in 2015.

*Andy Burnham MP is the Shadow Secretary of State for Health.