Health bosses and opposition leaders remain sceptical about the PM’s forum (Picture: PA)

Prime minister Rishi Sunak is holding emergency crunch talks today with health leaders in a bid to ease the ongoing crisis seizing the NHS.

The NHS Recovery Forum at No 10 today will have social care and delayed discharge, urgent and emergency care, elective care and primary care on the table.

A Downing Street spokesperson said the aim was ‘to help share knowledge and practical solutions so that we can tackle the most crucial challenges such as delayed discharge and emergency care’.

The forum, slated to last most of today, will see health secretary Steve Barclay, Treasury minister John Glen, Cabinet Office minister Oliver Dowden and NHS England chief executive officer Amanda Pritchard in attendance.

England’s chief medical officer Chris Witty was seen entering Downing Street.

But don’t expect anything to come out of the talks, say opposition MPs and Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, a membership body that represents the health sector.

Labour said patients deserve more than a ‘talking shop’, saying the gathering is the ‘equivalent of the arsonists convening a forum with the fire brigade to put out the inferno they started’.

Chris Witty, the nation’s chief medical officer, was among those in attendance (Picture: Rory Arnold / No10 Downing Street)

Rishi Sunak met with top health bosses and ministers (Picture: Rory Arnold / No10 Downing Street)

Emergency services are being stretched too thin, NHS bosses say (PictureL Tejas Sandhu/SOPA Images/Shutterstock)

While Liberal Democrat MP told the Mirror it was ‘too little, too late’.

Taylor added: ‘The scale of the crisis facing the NHS requires political leadership from the top, so NHS leaders will welcome the Prime Minister’s focus on helping to solve the challenges.

‘But the reality is that there are no silver bullets here. This crisis has been a decade or more in the making and we are now paying the high price for years of inaction and managed decline.’

After more than a decade of government underfunding, the NHS is creaking at the seams, health bosses and workers say.

Junior doctors have threatened to strike for three days in March, the latest health workers to look to job action as the only solution to longstanding issues.

Stagnating pay amid the cost-of-living crisis and declining working conditions exaggerated by staff shortages are among their reasons to strike, unions say.

Opposition MPs don’t expect the talks to amount to much (Picture: Rory Arnold / No10 Downing Street)

Emergency services are at a knife-edge, with discharge rates falling to new lows in England last week – only a third of patients actually left when they were ready to.

Nearly half of ambulance crews were delayed at A&E by more than 30 minutes that week as well, with 55,000 hours lost to delayed ambulance handovers.

‘Patients are experiencing delays that we haven’t seen for years,’ added Taylor.

‘High levels of flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and rising Covid levels are exacerbating the problem but the cause is decades of under-investment in staffing, capital and the lack of a long-term solution to the capacity-crunch facing social care.

‘None of these problems can be solved tomorrow.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].

For more stories like this, check our news page.

‘None of these problems can be solved tomorrow.’