A CONSERVATIVE Parliamentary candidate called the Health Secretary’s team this morning to ensure that Worcestershire Royal’s A&E department gets a £25 million upgrade following the election.

However, a Labour health minister visiting the region today said the crisis happened on the Conservative’s watch and was the legacy of ‘savage cuts’ to adult social care putting pressure on A&E departments like the one at Worcester.

Robin Walker, the Parliamentary Conservative candidate for Worcester, said he had been calling for a significant upgrade of the A&E at Worcestershire Royal Hospital in Worcester for 'years'.

He said: “This reflects the urgency of doing that. I spoke to Jeremy Hunt’s team this morning. I have personal assurances he will look at the case for upgrading Worcestershire Royal Hospital’s A&E as a matter of urgency. The acute trust has been working on plans for an estimated £25 million upgrade of A&E.

“They have to have more nurses and doctors. There is a general capacity problem. The hospital was built to serve a smaller population that it is serving now. I think it’s time we got the A&E properly upgraded to meet that demand.”

He attributed part of the problems to a badly negotiated Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deal signed off under Labour in 1997. The PFI meant the hospital opened in 2002.

Mr Walker who worked as a driver for Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell who refused to sign off the PFI deal and said he was working to claw back cash from the PFI deal.

Shadow Health Minister Andrew Gwynne, who has been visiting the region and is campaigning to win the Denton and Reddish constituency, said: “I think it’s really concerning . The Labour Party has been warning the Government for quite some time about the crisis in A&E. We put it down to the £3 billion reorganisation of the NHS that took time and resources away from the frontline.”

He said there was ‘no easy answer to this’ and the NHS 111 service manned by medically unqualified staff answering calls using a computer algorithm encouraged people to go to A&E.

He also criticised what he called ‘savage cuts in adult social care’ and said people could not get an appointment at their GP and that walk-in centres had closed.

Mr Gwynne said: “People are going to A&E as their first port rather than their last port of call. It is the first time ever that an ambulance trust have had to call in a medical incident officer to free up ambulances to enable them to meet their service obligations.

“To me it smacks of an NHS that is really struggling to cope. That is absolutely why we need a Government committed to tackling the A&E crisis.”

He said Labour’s £2.5 million NHS Time to Care Fund would fund doctors and nurses that can free up hospital wards to cope with some of the pressures hospitals are experiencing.