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Hospital Services (Thanet)
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. McLoughlin.]
1.55 am
Mr. Jonathan Aitken (South Thanet): Even at this late hour, I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the subject of hospital services in Thanet. Unlike most Adjournment debates, the purpose of tonight's debate is not to air a grievance, complaint or criticism, or even to cajole the Government into righting some wrong or remedying some defect.
Instead, my purpose is simply to express appreciation and gratitude for a great national health service achievement in Thanet and to pay tribute to the doctors, nurses, managers, staff and others who have played their part in bringing that achievement to fulfilment. Their combined efforts have made a dream come true for the people and patients of Thanet in my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet(Mr. Gale), who I am delighted to see in his place and who is hoping to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
The dream come true that I am talking about is the opening of the new Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother hospital in Thanet. It happened only a few days ago, when the first patients moved into its dazzling new facilities, which consist of a £20 million investment in state-of-the art medical technology and the new wards, operating theatres and buildings that go with it. With the medical and managerial innovations that I shall describe, the new hospital complex marks the beginning of a new era in high-quality hospital care for Thanet.
For more than 25 years, Thanet has been campaigning for its own properly equipped and resourced district general hospital. The campaign has been a long and, at times, arduous struggle, sometimes against forces of obstruction within our own NHS district and region.
Thanks in no small measure to the long-term tenacity of the local campaigners and to the more recent success of the Government's NHS reforms, the new Thanet Healthcare NHS trust has been able to match the local vision with an appropriate allocation of more than£20 million of nationally funded resources. The result is the finest hospital in east Kent and one of the finest in the United Kingdom.
The Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother hospital has no fewer than eight operating theatres on site, four of them high-tech theatres, including two laminar flow rooms for orthopaedics. Those new facilities will give the patients of Thanet the lowest waiting list time for operations in the South Thames region and some of the best post-operative care.
One of the most notable features of the new hospital, to which I draw the attention of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health, is the critical care floor. It is a specialist complex consisting of four theatres, an intensive care unit, a cardiac care unit and a high-dependence unit, all in close proximity on the same floor and managed as a single medical unit.
I am told that the facilities on that floor are matched by only one other hospital in Britain--Addenbrookes in Cambridge. We are proud in Thanet to be one of the pioneers of that relatively new hospital concept.
However good the facilities of any hospital may be, they ultimately depend on the skills of the men and women who work in them. In that respect, we are highly fortunate in Thanet because our new hospital, under the enlightened clinical leadership of its medical director, Brian Cocking, has a first-class team of 40 consultants and nearly 500 trained nursing staff. The collegiate spirit of the hospital showed itself to excellent effect the weekend before last, when almost everyone on the staff worked round the clock to move patients into the new complex from the older wards and from the venerable Royal Sea Bathing hospital in Margate, which will be closing after just over 100 years of fine service.
Our local paper, the Thanet Gazette, captured the mood of this massive operation with the headline:
I thought that that was a rather clever headline, because it subtly recognised that emotions as well as logistics were involved, the principal emotion being pride that, at long last, Thanet had a hospital ready for the 21st century.
Last Friday, my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet and I walked round the gleaming new wards, theatres and recovery rooms of the Queen Mum hospital, as it is already becoming popularly known. We both felt that it was a joy to share in that emotion of local pride. He and I know as well as anyone that the battle to build the new facilities was won, not just after the usual financial infighting in Westminster and Whitehall--important as those skirmishes were--but as a result of the tremendous support given to the project by the local community. Perhaps the most symbolic element of that support was the backing given so wholeheartedly to the fund-raising campaign in Thanet for the hospital's new accident and emergency department which, under its dynamic consultant, Alan Jones, will open its doors in July. It is the focal point of the hospital's range of acute services.
Neither the accident and emergency department nor even, possibly, the new complex itself would be coming into service this year were it not been for the momentum provided by what was known as the Tear appeal. The campaign, masterminded by an inspirational Broadstairs resident and community leader, Mrs. Maureen Greig, raised more than £650,000 for the accident and emergency department's equipment budget. More important, it gave a kick start to the final phase of the campaign to create a truly modern district general hospital. I pay a particularly warm tribute to Maureen Greig for her pivotal role in making the dream come true.
If I were to single out one other individual from an earlier era who made a vital contribution to this hospital development, it would be Dr. Margaret Voysey. She held the torch aloft in some of the darkest moments in the, at times, faltering struggle to get the new hospital built, and at various moments combined the role of doctor, campaigner, consultant, advisor, NHS manager, general headbanger and inspirer-in-chief. Both she and Mrs. Greig deserve the congratulations that are flowing to them from all sectors of our community.
Looking ahead, all thoughtful observers of the medical and hospital scene in Thanet know that the opening of the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother hospital is not a moment for looking back or for resting on laurels. This is the beginning of a new era of steadily improving quality health care for the people of Thanet. Success in that new era will depend on three elements of continuity for the future: good medical staff, good management and good government.
I have already praised the medical and nursing team at the hospital, but it must be acknowledged that the recruitment of their successors, their juniors and their future leaders is crucial to the hospital's future. In recent years, hospitals in Thanet have suffered from two unjustified difficulties, which are closely linked. They are, first, manipulations by some of the consultants in neighbouring hospitals in misguided attempts to downgrade Thanet hospitals and, secondly, withdrawal of recognition by the royal colleges of some junior doctor posts. I believe that the royal colleges have been led astray by rival consultants' gamesmanship in this regard and I hope that they will swiftly restore recognition now that all their criteria for recognition have been so well met by the standards, facilities and procedures in the new hospital complex.
The prospects for recruitment and retention of consultants are bound to be enhanced by a new £3 million development at the hospital, which is expected to be signed and formally announced in the next few days. I refer to the development of a postgraduate medical centre and a 23-bed private patient unit, which will be adjacent to the hospital and able to use the new facilities in the hospital. Construction is expected to start this summer.
Another development will be the building of new accommodation on-site for junior medical staff and nursing staff. Both of these projects are going forward under the private finance initiative--a successful Government reform in which I played some part when I was with the Treasury--which allows private capital to be invested in the national health service and other public sector developments.
I wish that there was time to say more about the other management initiatives that will come on stream in and around the hospital in the next few months, but the hour is late and I am anxious to make way for my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet, who has been a doughty campaigner over the years for the new hospital complex that serves our constituents, but which is located in his constituency.
As I said at the beginning of my speech, the hospital development has been possible only because of the success of the Government's NHS reforms, which unlocked both the resources and the management skills that made it happen. Huge credit is due to the chairman and the chief executive of the Thanet Healthcare NHS trust, respectively Mr. Glenn Stone and Mr. Barry Page. Their stewardship of the project and of the hospital has been a beacon of managerial excellence--and long may it and they continue to shine.
"Hospital switch is a moving experience".
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