Andrew Marr has told Theresa May that he would not be alive today if he had suffered the kind of ambulance delays and A&E waits being seen in the NHS this winter, in a personal challenge to the Prime Minister during a live BBC interview.
The veteran broadcaster, who suffered a stroke in January 2013, recounted the case of Leah Butler-Smith whose mother waited five hours to be seen after a stroke this week.
Challenging Mrs May’s repeated claims that the NHS is better prepared and funded for this winter than any other, he said: “If I’d been waiting for five hours before I’d seen a doctor after my stroke, I would not be here talking to you.
“This is about life and death, and up and down the country people are having horrendous experiences of the NHS.”
“Whether you say there’s a plan, or not, there’s a real problem.”
The Prime Minister said she could not comment on the case of Ms Butler-Smith but insisted the NHS was performing better and seeing more people within the four-hour target than a few years ago.
However, the she conceded “nothing is perfect” and said more could be done to improve performance.
Earlier this week, Ms Butler-Smith posted a video of a queue of ambulances outside a hospital in Chelmsford, Essex, explaining that her mother had had a stroke, but was currently tenth in a queue to get into hospital.
After waiting an hour in the ambulance they faced a further four-hour wait to be seen by a doctor.
It came as official NHS figures showed nearly 17,000 patients were delayed more than half an hour in the back of an ambulance over Christmas because hospitals simply do not have the capacity to take in more patients.
The Prime Minister said: “I recognise that people have concerns if they have an experience of that sort.
“If we look at what is happening across the NHS, we see it is delivering for more people.
“It is treating more people, and more people are being seen within the four hours every day – when compared to a few years ago. But nothing is perfect and there is more for us to do.”
Figures, released by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, show that performance against the target of treating 95 per cent of patients within four hours of them attending A&E had plummeted.
In the first week of November, 86 per cent of NHS trusts were hitting the four-hour target, which was last met nationally in 2015.
But in the last week of December that plummeted to 75 per cent, with 46 out of 54 hospitals measured reporting worse performance.
In the wake of the Autumn Budget awarding the NHS less than half of the extra funding it had asked for, health service chiefs warned that patients should expect longer waits as a result.
Jonathan Ashworth MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, said: “Yet again Theresa May has shown utter disregard for those patients languishing on trolleys, delayed in ambulances in the freezing cold weather or forced to wait longer in pain and anxiety because their operation has been cancelled.”
