| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
8.36 pm
Mr. Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston): I follow the hon. Member for Belfast, South (Rev. Martin Smyth) in apologising to the House for not being present during the opening speeches. I was stuck with a difficult constituency problem.
My family has much for which to be grateful from the success of the national health service. My daughter was found to be suffering from a congenital hip dislocation and endured a long period of traumatic surgery and recuperation. She had surgery in the famous Myrtle Street children's hospital in Liverpool, followed by recuperation in a hospital in Heswall that is now closed. She has had a tremendously successful full recovery. I balance that against the extraordinary recent developments in human genetics. Conditions such as that, for which there seems to be a genetic propensity, could be resolved in the longer term if we are prepared to invest sufficiently in research and development. That is a huge task for the health service, the Medical Research Council and the private sector. We shall have to revisit the matter in detail.
I want to deal with issues in the north-west, especially those that affect the health authorities that service my constituency, Chester and the Wirral. The Government
should be warned. Those health authorities also service Wirral, South, where events this week may well prove embarrassing for the Conservative party.
The hon. Member for Waveney (Mr. Porter) questioned the integrity of some of our data. I notice from "Dod's Parliamentary Companion" that he studied at the New College of Speech and Drama--obviously the dramatic element had the most impact.
The Conservative party should be warned that the state of the health service is a serious issue. The Labour party has not just picked the relevant figures out of the air; the state of the health service has become a key issue in the by-election. The Daily Post of Liverpool, hardly an organ of the Labour party, ran the following sub-heading on 22 February:
That newspaper is right, as is the Labour party candidate, Ben Chapman, to expose the deficiencies in the local health service. I have campaigned with our candidate, and we met an elderly lady on her doorstep who told us of the difficulties that she was facing because the ambulance service could not provide adequate transport to take her for necessary orthopaedic treatment.
I should like the House to consider the problems faced by the Countess of Chester hospital and South Cheshire health authority. I have studied their documents and it is clear that they are in crisis. I invite the Minister to call upon that hospital and the health authority to publish what they have described as their recovery plan. If it is necessary to produce such a plan, there must, by definition, be a problem. The authority has published such a plan in an internal report, which should now be made available to the public. I call on the Minister to ensure that that happens. The report apparently sets out a series of cuts that must be made to services that are otherwise regarded as essential.
It appears that the hospital has a serious funding problem. From the report that has been presented to colleagues in the north-west, it appears that that problem is so serious that the hospital has had to consider how it can pay its staff and suppliers. One must deal seriously with a hospital trust in such severe crisis.
The lack of staff at the hospital has caused problems in the accident and emergency department and has also caused the temporary closure of certain wards. South Cheshire health authority is insisting that the Countess of Chester hospital must cut £500,000 from its staff budget. I am recounting not scare stories, but facts. That is why people in Chester, in my constituency and throughout the Wirral are expressing grave concern about the state of the health service.
Many of my constituents attend hospitals in the Wirral, for example, Arrowe Park, which is in the constituency of the right hon. Member for Wirral, West (Mr. Hunt), and Clatterbridge, which is in the Wirral, South constituency. Both those hospitals have caused serious
problems for my constituents, which are connected not simply with basic health provision but with the infrastructure that is necessary to make the health service work. A simple example--which is outside the terms of the debate, so I shall not dwell on it--is that my constituents have great difficulty getting to or from the hospitals, either as day-patients or as visitors, simply because the bus service provided since deregulation makes it almost impossible to travel to them. Patients are now having to follow extremely convoluted public transport routes to meet their health needs.
The biggest issues that have emerged from the debate are undoubtedly waiting lists and bed blocking. Before Conservative Members argue that bed blocking is simply a problem caused by Wirral council, and therefore one that they can blame on the Labour party, I remind them that I represent a constituency in Cheshire, which suffers from similar problems. That authority is controlled by the Conservative party.
Cheshire suffers acutely from long waiting lists and bed blocking. Those problems are especially severe when it comes to orthopaedic surgery, especially hip replacement, because of the elderly population profile. A friend of mine, Mr. Frank McCoy, has been waiting a considerable time for a hip replacement. I believe that the pain and worry that are caused are entirely unnecessary because it should be possible for a well-managed authority to offer proper guidance to patients on how long they may have to wait. That authority should ensure that the waiting time is reasonable.
The Opposition spokesman, my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith), referred to one case that I have also come across, of an elderly person who was told that she would have to wait 154 weeks for an orthopaedic consultation. That is an extraordinary delay. I found it so hard to believe that I searched out the relevant letter, and I can assure the House that it referred to that suggested waiting time. No explanation was offered. That delay reveals the extent of the crisis that we face.
To answer the hon. Member for Waveney, it is because of that crisis that the Labour party has pledged to use the first £100 million saved from cutting NHS red tape on targeting people on the waiting lists. That is an important commitment. I do not know about the hon. Gentleman's constituency, but I listened with interest to the hon. Member for Belfast, South, who expressed concern about apparent regional discrepancies. It seems from the debate that the experience of some Conservative Members is entirely different from that of Members representing the north-west of England and Northern Ireland.
Waiting lists are an acute problem that has been exacerbated by the way in which health authorities and social services departments have failed to get to grips with the discharge process. A consistent bed blocking problem exists, and in the Wirral and Cheshire, it is seen simply as a case of overcrowding.
A number of issues must be examined. One that has not been touched upon in detail tonight, but which impinges upon the Wirral and the NHS in west Cheshire, is the provision of community care. A current proposal out for consultation calls for the merger of Wirral Community Healthcare trust and the West Cheshire NHS trust. I was particularly interested to learn from that consultative document, which reached me eventually, that
it pre-empted what appears to be the perfect managerial solution. It did not adequately address the needs of people in the community. For example, at the outset nobody had addressed the question whether Halton community trust should be drawn into the equation.
The Government seem to accept the principle that GPs should have a lead role in the discussions, and GPs have argued that the debate should be widened. Ellesmere Port hospital provides important recovery services for patients who have had major surgery and suffered strokes in other areas; we must ensure that those patients continue to have a service in future. We do not want a service that is affected by the magnetic pull of either the city of Chester or Birkenhead, leaving those of us in the middle of the Wirral seriously disadvantaged. I am waiting to hear from the Government on that. The results of the application were due to be made public in February, but I understand that they have been delayed. I recognise that there could be potential sensible savings in administrative overheads in bringing the trusts together, but the move must be driven by patient need, not by bureaucratic needs.
There are clear problems with waiting lists; there are clear problems with fewer nurses and more bureaucrats. Since the Government introduced the internal market into the NHS, the north-west has lost more than 4,400 nurses and gained more than 2,500 bureaucrats. It does not matter how one dresses up the definitions of the job functions: those figures stand up to examination. One has only to visit some of the hospitals in and around my area to see that. An extra £284,000 a day has gone into bureaucracy in the north-west; that would pay for about 300 more patients to be treated every day.
There are problems with accident and emergency provision. I referred to the Countess of Chester hospital, which is suffering from cuts in that service. There have also been difficulties because the next accident and emergency provision is at Arrowe Park hospital. That means that some people have to drive past one major hospital to get to the accident and emergency department. I appreciate--and everyone should recognise--the importance of Clatterbridge hospital in terms of its oncology service, which is world renowned. But one should not simply say that we should therefore concentrate another important service--in this case, accident and emergency--miles away, so that people have further to travel.
I am also concerned that the Government appear to be hiding the facts. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Broadgreen (Mrs. Kennedy) referred to the BBC's "Close Up North" programme, which showed that accident and emergency provision in the north-west was in danger of collapsing. That was not a journalist's view, but a view expressed in a report that the Government had in their hands. Why was that report not published? Unless such information--which is in the Government's hands--enters the public domain, we cannot have a rational debate on the needs of the service. That is not the only report that is being held back from the public. I referred earlier to the debate that is taking place between my health authority and the Countess of Chester hospital about severe cuts at that hospital. Those cuts are affecting people across my community.
I also have serious concerns about intensive care provision. There are proposals to cut 27 beds at St. Catherine's hospital in Tranmere, which will have knock-on effects at the acute trust and the Wirral which,
in turn, will have knock-on effects at the trust that covers the Countess of Chester hospital. Serious problems are beginning to emerge in that community as a result of the cuts.
I have referred to orthopaedic services, and we have heard about the case of one elderly lady. Problems are exacerbated when people simply do not get consultant appointments--my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury gave one such example.
"Daily Post readers put health at the top of their list of concerns as waiting lists grow and staff morale sinks".
The headline referred to
"The chronic NHS figures which could tip the political balance in Wirral South".
Those figures are not from the Labour party, but were collected in a survey undertaken by that newspaper.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |