NHS England chair Penny Dash has been criticised after suggesting that winter planning for the months ahead will be “exactly the same” as previous years, despite concerns by doctors that such planning has been ineffective.
Speaking at the King’s Fund on Tuesday 8 September, Dash, who took over as chair in April 2025, said, “We are about to have a paper come to the NHS England board on winter planning.
“This will be my sixth year as an NHS chair, with exactly the same paper on winter planning coming to the board. We can’t just keep going in the same way.”
Dash, previously chair of North West London Integrated Care Board (ICB), continued, “We know that we’ve got 40% of people turning up at A&E [hospital emergency departments] who don’t need to be in an A&E. We’ve got over 20% of emergency admissions who don’t need to be admitted to hospital.
“We’re just in groundhog day, trying to make an existing system, which is a suboptimal system, work better. So, we need to get on and do the redesign of urgent and emergency care.”
Dash’s comments—which follow the NHS’s busiest summer on record—have been met with incredulity among doctors.
Ian Higginson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, described Dash’s comments as an “admission of failure” and “immensely frustrating.”
Meanwhile, David Oliver, a consultant in geriatrics and acute general medicine and columnist for The BMJ, questioned what Dash as chair has “personally done to address the issues instead of wringing her hands.”
Oliver also pushed back on her claim that the issue lies in people coming into A&E unnecessarily.
“We know that the issue with long waits and overcrowding in A&E departments is not to do with people turning up there with minor injuries and illnesses.
“It is to do with patients who require admission to acute beds, because they are sick enough to need admission or because no alternative services are available for them, and there are not enough beds for them to be admitted to.”
Source: BMJ, 11 September 2026
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