Pippa addresses the NHS crisis in her regular Cambridge Independent column

Pippa's column in this week's Cambridge Independent (Feb 5 - 11, 2025) focuses on the crisis facing the NHS. You can read her piece below:

Our NHS is in crisis. It’s time we fixed it

This winter the NHS has once again been at breaking point as demand for healthcare soars. I’ve been hearing harrowing stories about people’s experiences in A&E, like the constituent who told me:

“The staff at the hospital could not have been kinder or more attentive but the experience was horrendous because of the length of my time on a hard chair, the 9 hour wait for a CT scan, at one point being given morphine for my pain and eventually ending up in a reclining chair surrounded by a drug addict yelling, a vomiting young girl, a young lad with severe chest pains and a troubled mental patient throwing biscuits at us. Bless Carol, the nurse who managed to keep us alive on her 13-hour shift.”

We know that the need for urgent care is ever increasing: 2024 was the busiest year on record for NHS England, with the highest number of A&E attendances ever, at 27.42 million, 7.1% higher than in 2023.

The range of pressures are diverse: our growing population is ageing and there is greater incidence of long-term health conditions, all while the numbers of our NHS workforce (doctors, GPs, nurses) aren’t keeping up with demand.

The situation in our region is still more urgent with unprecedented growth in population. Between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, the population of South Cambridgeshire increased by 9%, while in the past 10 years, Cambridge city has seen an 18% increase in its population.

We are fortunate to have the wonderful Addenbrookes hospital but here too winter pressures compound these problems. The hospital has been on its highest level of alert, with staff under huge pressure to meet demand, and its services severely overstretched. The East of England Ambulance Service has also been on its highest level of alert, having received more than 39,000 calls between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day – an unprecedented increase of 7,500 calls compared to a typical 8-day period in summer.

This comes against a backdrop of a chronic lack of investment in healthcare infrastructure in the Greater Cambridge area. Addenbrookes’ crumbling emergency estate is too small, no longer fit for purpose and increasingly costly to maintain. The Emergency Department was built to serve 25% of the patients it now sees. 40% of the emergency estate is over 50 years old. And yet, despite these awful circumstances, dedicated doctors, nurses, management and support staff go above and beyond, doing amazing work to keep us safe.

The case for significant new investment in healthcare infrastructure has never been greater, particularly given the Chancellor’s plans for even further growth in our area.

I have had multiple meetings with the senior leadership of Addenbrookes and I agree that it’s now time for a national conversation about the future of A&E and acute care. Whilst we do need the physical infrastructure of modern hospitals, we cannot continue to build ever larger hospitals to accommodate more and more patients. Instead, we have to find new ways of delivering healthcare care if our NHS is to be economically sustainable. That means improving primary care and adult social care in the community, supporting our GPs, pharmacists and innovative local health centres like the Melbourn Health Hub. It won’t surprise you that, as a Liberal Democrat, that also means fixing adult social care so that those medically fit to leave hospital can do so swiftly, freeing up beds, because there are carers for them at home.

Now that we have had success in our campaign for the Cambridge Cancer Research and Children’s hospitals, I will be supporting Cambridge University Hospitals on the campaign to transform emergency/acute care here in Cambridgeshire and for the region.

Given the Government’s plans for growth, announced by the Chancellor in a speech last month, we are going to see further significant increases in population in the decades ahead, and demand for healthcare will continue to rise. We must meet this challenge head on and build healthcare infrastructure fit for the future of our region.