There’s more to fixing the NHS than chasing A&E waiting times

NHS workers used to enjoy hearty backslaps for their ‘jolly hard work’ to bring down accident & emergency waiting times. Such praise was delivered by the Labour government’s chief nursing officer at a conference I covered back in 2003. Back then, talk was of shrinking queues rather than impending ‘A&E crisis’. Nurses should congratulate themselves, she beamed, for helping speed patients through casualty in fewer than four hours.

This apparent success was just the beginning, if this graph, circulated in a campaign e-mail by Labour’s shadow health secretary recently, is to be believed:

‘This is what three years of David Cameron running the NHS looks like: a crisis in A&E,’ it rails. ‘Patients waiting in the back of ambulances and over 4,000 nurses lost. He has broken all of his promises on the NHS and patients are paying the price.’

This rhetoric of success sounds a bit hollow to me. As a former NHS worker, I witnessed first hand how waiting times were reduced under Labour.