huge advances in medicines, along with changes to our behaviour, like cutting smoking, healthier eating, means it s not unusual to reach our 80s, 90s, even beyond that. but the trend is already putting a huge strain on the nhs. it is thought that over the next ten years, we will need to create another1 millionjobs in health and social care. if we don t prepare for these changes now, and it might not be a winter crisis we will be talking about, but the future of the whole nhs that at stake. to see the latest data on hospitals where you live, you can use the bbc s winter tracker. you just put in your postcode to find the waiting times in a&e or for operations and ambulances. visit.
the issue is whether you can pay for care yourself or not, or whether the government is paying for you. there just isn t the capacity to buy the social care you need. i think rishi sunak, the prime minister, described this as the number one problem for the nhs at the moment. and there has been more government funding, £500 million, which sounds like a lot of money, in september and then another 200, 250 million emergency funding just before christmas. is that the best way to be spending that money, or is there a more sustainable, more efficient way to fund social care? you re right, £750 million, to those of us, like normal people, that sounds a huge amount of money, but the social care budget is more than £20 billion a year, so actually it s quite a small portion of the overall budget. some of the all party committees in the house of commons have looked at, and the house of lords as, have looked at what would it take to sustainably improve the social care system. and they ve conclu
and you will hear calls going out for assistance for other groups and you can t get to them. it is delays like this that stop paramedics getting back on their own quickly to the next person who needs help. now, we ve pulled together some of the key data, figures that help explain how the nhs is performing and what that means for patients, starting with those ambulances. anyone who calls 999 for an emergency like a stroke or heart attack should get an ambulance in 18 minutes, that s the target. in december, that soared to 93 minutes in england, easily the highest on record. there are 90 patients waiting to be seen at the moment, that is 90, who are still waiting to be seen. our current waiting profile is seven and a half hours. by the time i get home in the morning at eight o clock, some of you will still be here waiting for a doctor. the wait will get up to 12 or 13 hours. when patients reach a&e itself, there is often another long wait. the number turning up has risen
jumped between the mid 1990s and today. that is a big increase in just 25 years. and crucially, the number of over 65s shown in red has been rising rapidly. and that s the group which needs far, far more care from doctors and from the nhs. it s a trend expected to continue in the future, and that is projected to put even more pressure the nhs. so, demographic changes is definitely a pressure for nhs and social care systems. it s not necessaryjust being older, it s the fact that as we age, we tend to develop multiple long term conditions, so we might have diabetes and dementia, we might have a mental health condition and a cardiovascular disease. and then the nhs is needing to deal with those multiple problems all at the same time towards the end of people s lives. but a lot of those conditions are caused by a whole host of things
about how we ve lived our lives, so the food we ve eaten, the alcohol we have or haven t drunk, how active we ve been. so if we can help the population think about ageing in a healthy way, living in a healthy way, that can reduce future health care demand. fundamentally, though, the big question is, do we spend enough on health care in the uk? £190 billion on the nhs across the whole of the uk each year. people look at that and it s a really big, huge figure. but i guess the question is, compared with other health systems, how do we compare, and is it enough? yes, so the international comparisons are always a little bit tricky because it is what basis are you comparing on, and changes to gdp can then also change on what you spend on health. generally, it accepted in the uk we spend around a couple of percent less per year on our health care system. if you are doing that for one or two years, it s probably something a health care system can cope with. but if you ve been doing it for a