Can Barclay and Sturgeon get a grip on the NHS crisis?

Both the Westminster and Scottish governments are trying to show they have a grip on the crises in their respective National Health Services today. Neither currently find themselves politically in a strong place on the winter crisis. 

English Health Secretary Steve Barclay is giving a statement to the House of Commons when it returns this afternoon in which he will reheat two existing policies. He will confirm details of a £200 million plan for speeding up the discharge of patients from hospitals and into care settings. This was something the government did fund during the early months of the Covid pandemic, but which the Treasury quickly shut down, despite abundant evidence that the money made a lot of difference and freed up beds. Some of those ‘care settings’ are hotels, which underlines that capacity within the care sector is one of the many problems bleeding into the NHS. 

Barclay is also announcing six ‘discharge frontrunners’, which will be local care systems keen to explore new and radical ways of getting medically fit patients out of hospitals.