Rishi Sunak needs to follow medical advice and better fund the NHS

Editorial: The country’s leading emergency care doctor has issued a stark warning about the crisis in care – the government must act now to cut unnecessary deaths

Ignoring medical advice is usually harmful (PA Archive)

Probably because they realised that another NHS winter crisis on the scale witnessed in recent years would finally destroy any chance of winning the next election and saving their political careers, ministers have already approved and launched the NHS plan for the coming – entirely predictable – emergency. The fact that they are acting some months in advance does at least offer some hope that the headlines won’t be as grim as must be feared.

Yet it would seem that not all of those who will be closest to the front line are convinced that all will be well. Indeed, far from it. The nation’s most senior physician in the accident and emergency field, Dr Adrian Boyle, tells The Independent that he has little confidence that the plan “will do very much at all to prevent queues of ambulances outside hospitals, or the shameful sight of patients waiting for hours on trolleys in the corridors in A&Es full to bursting ... I have seen headlines suggesting that this plan will see 5,000 new beds and 800 new ambulances. This is just not the case.”