THE British Medical Association (BMA) has warned patients to expect “huge waits” in emergency departments with the NHS braced for its “worst-ever” winter.

This comes as Labour’s East Hampshire prospective parliamentary candidate blamed Conservative policies for the crisis hospitals are facing.

Labour’s Gaynor Austin told the Herald she has “experienced first hand” the “appalling strain placed on services by contracting out and cuts in funding”.

She spoke of waiting “over five hours in A&E” for her daughter to be put on a “time dependent, life-saving drip”, which was eventually administered with her lying “on a sofa in an empty room” because “cubicles were entirely full”.

“This was not, as one might think, a busy Saturday night, but an ordinary Wednesday afternoon,” she added.

The government “policy of underfunding the NHS” has stopped the service from “raising its capacity to match patient demand”.

“Consequently the NHS is forced to rely on the private sector for help providing core services,” she explained.

“Labour will repair the damage caused by the Tories’ deliberate running down of the NHS, bring services back into public control and protect it from Boris Johnson’s sell out Brexit deal with Donald Trump.”

But at a public meeting on Monday night, Conservative rival Damian Hinds told residents this kind of privatisation rhetoric was an age-old tactic of the Labour Party – because if you “say it often enough” people “start to believe it”.

“At every election since God was a boy that claim has been made and it has never been true,” Mr Hinds added.

With a Tory government operating for 44 of the 71 years the NHS has existed, he said “if something terrible was going to happen to it – it probably would have happened already”.

Mr Hinds insisted he and his colleagues in the Parliamentary Conservative Party are “very proud” of the NHS as its one of the “best things” about being British.

Ahead of the upcoming election, the BMA is calling on the next government to prioritise the NHS as it warns of a “perfect storm” caused by staff shortages, a potentially cold winter and the impact of Brexit.

Alex Whitfield, chief executive of Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Our emergency departments have been extremely busy over the last few months, with an unprecedented number of patients needing our help, and we expect to be even busier over the winter months.”