Can Rishi Sunak’s new health secretary Victoria Atkins save the NHS from a winter crisis?

How much strain is the NHS under? What can the health secretary do about it? Archie Mitchell looks at the pressures facing both

Victoria Atkins has inherited a broken sector facing a winter of discontent (PA)

Victoria Atkins has taken charge of the health service at a torrid time, with waiting lists at record highs and A&E departments under severe strain.

As the UK plunged into a cold snap, leaving parts of the country facing temperatures as low as -12C, the new health secretary promised that her “number one priority this winter” is averting a crisis in the NHS.

“We are going to do everything we can,” Atkins told the BBC.

But how much strain is the NHS under? What can she do about it? And what did we learn from her first major interviews as health secretary?

How bad could it be?

In September, the waiting list for planned NHS treatments in England soared to a record high of 7.77 million.

Rishi Sunak made cutting waiting lists one of his five key pledges last January, when they stood at 7.2 million, but they have been on the rise ever since.

Meanwhile, ambulance waiting times are more than twice what they should be, at an average of almost 42 minutes, and inside hospitals 95 per cent of beds are full.

The chief nurse of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), Nicola Ranger, said on Sunday: “There is a real frustration amongst nursing staff that they cannot deliver the care they want for their patients. They are battling against record waiting lists, longer waits for ambulances, and staff shortages on every shift.”

What can the health secretary do?

On Sunday, Atkins set out her priorities as health secretary, vowing to make the NHS “faster, simpler and fairer for patients”.

She promised to cut waiting lists and improve A&E performance, cut down on bureaucracy, offer NHS staff new technology, and spread resources around the country in an effort to ensure that “health outcomes are not determined by where you live”.

And the health secretary said winter planning in the NHS had started “much earlier” than normal this year. “We’re building 5,000 beds in hospitals, we’ve got more ambulances on the road,” she said.

“We are going to do everything we can to do this. It’s my number one priority for the winter, because I know the worry that people have,” she added.

But critics say the problems plaguing the NHS can not be fixed overnight, and that they are the result of a decade of real-terms pay cuts fuelling staff shortages.

There are currently more than 120,000 vacancies across the NHS, with staff increasingly stretched.

The RCN chief called for Atkins to boost staff pay across the NHS and “deliver safe staffing levels”.

What did Atkins tell us on Sunday morning?

As well as promising to tackle the looming winter crisis as a priority, Atkins said the government is sticking to Sunak’s pledge to cut waiting lists.

But crucially, she suggested that the goal could be at risk – blaming striking consultants and junior doctors.

The health secretary told the BBC: “We are very much looking to meet those targets [to cut waiting lists], but I need the consultants to pass this settlement that we’ve put forward [and] I hope very much that doctors in training will be able to reach a settlement with us as well.

“Then, if we have removed the threat of industrial action from the NHS ... for example, in the October set of actions, we have 40,000 appointments being rescheduled each day – well then, that stops and we’re able to get on with it.”