Shadow Health minister Andrew Lansley has been visiting Medway to see how improvements can be made in the local NHS.

Mr Lansley spent the day meeting with GPs and dentists and being given a tour of the Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham.

He said NHS staff had been working extremely hard to cope with pressures over the Christmas and New Year period.

He added: “If you are trying to look after 10 per cent more patients than you ever expected to and they are still coming through the door, it’s not going to be perfect and the speed with which people are going to be seen is not going to ideal. But what we have to understand is that people are working their level best and there is very high quality staff who are trying to do their very best, and actually Medway Maritime as a hospital if you look at its outcomes overall, they are very good outcomes and I don’t think anyone should ever, with anybody, treat the exception as if it were the rule.”

Mr Lansley was particularly keen to discuss the issue of single sex wards.

He said: “It’s very important that patients have a right to expect that they should not be admitted for when they come for a planned operation into mixed sex accommodation, the government has been talking about that for years, they haven’t done it. In Medway Maritime the pressures on beds and wards have been considerable but that has meant from time to time in recent weeks anything up to one fifth of patients aren’t in accommodation that meets that standard, well this is going to have to be tackled and I know that the board of the trust here at Medway Maritime are looking at that.”

Mr Lansley also said many GPs he had met were unhappy with the choose and book system.

He said: “They want to have a more friendly effective simple system for referring patients into the hospital of their choice locally.”