Labour has condemned the government for its handling of hospital wait times, calling the figures “deeply shocking”. Commenting on the state of the NHS, the shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, said: “people are dying in fear and pain, waiting for help and that help hasn’t come.” Report by Ajagbef. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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NewsTranscript
00:00 We have recently discovered some really shocking statistics.
00:05 120,000 people died last year whilst waiting for treatment in the NHS.
00:12 That is twice the number that it was a few years ago.
00:16 It's deeply shocking.
00:19 People are dying in fear, in pain, waiting for help, and that help hasn't come.
00:27 Rishi Sunak says that hospital waiting lists are his priority, and yet he has no plan for this.
00:34 The number of people on waiting lists over the last year since he became Prime Minister has gone up by 600,000.
00:41 We have 7.5 million people on waiting lists, and there's no plan from this government on how on earth they're going to get this waiting list down.
00:50 First of all, we would increase the number of doctors and nurses,
00:53 and we would train them up, and the money we would use for that is the money that we would get from closing the loophole
00:59 that allows people who are from abroad to live in this country and not pay taxes.
01:04 So we would get rid of non-doms, and we would use that money for paying up more doctors and nurses.
01:08 We would make sure that we used, if we needed, the private sector to fill in gaps where there are gaps in the NHS.
01:14 So if you need to get your hip replaced, and there's a long waiting list for your local hospital,
01:19 you would be able to go to a private hospital instead and just get it done.
01:23 We're not going to do anything other than simply what is right and look after people, so we're going to do that.
01:30 We also need to look at the causes of why it is that people end up in hospital,
01:34 so we need to make sure that there is more support for people living in the community,
01:38 and that we make sure that our social care system works properly, we look after people when they come out of hospital,
01:43 and we also know that there's a really strong connection between people's mental health and their physical health.
01:48 So we would make sure that there is a much more priority on mental health.
01:53 So we would make sure that we have, for example, people within the schools who are mental health specialists,
01:59 who are there helping youngsters.
02:01 We would make sure that there are mental health specialists within the NHS, A&E departments.
02:06 We need to make sure that throughout, we're weaving both the mental and physical health together,
02:11 because they can't be not linked.
02:15 - Yeah.