House of Commons
Wednesday 5 March 1997
The House met at half-past Nine o'clock
PRAYERS
[Madam Speaker in the Chair]
Hospitals (Northern Ireland)
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Wells.]
9.34 am
Mr. Roy Beggs (East Antrim): I appreciate the opportunity provided by this Adjournment debate to focus on hospital provision in Northern Ireland. Many of my colleagues wish to catch your eye, Madam Speaker, and you will be as relieved as the Minister to learn that I do not intend to prevent him from having reasonable time to respond.
Everyone in Northern Ireland can expect to use the hospital services available to us at some time or other. We are all concerned to maintain the excellence of our hospital provision. In 1998, the national health service in Northern Ireland will be 50 years old. It came into being under a Unionist Government, which was committed in the post-war era to the improvement of social welfare. My colleagues and I welcome the commitment given by the Government to increase expenditure on the health of the nation year on year, and would welcome a similar announcement from the Opposition to ensure appropriate future funding levels for Northern Ireland.
It should be recognised that Northern Ireland has special problems as one of the least well-off regions of the United Kingdom with specific regional problems, such as an unusually high rate of heart disease and a high number of patients suffering from cancer. Those problems should be borne in mind when funding decisions are made.
The cash crisis and the inadequacy of present funding of the health service in Northern Ireland received a positive response from the Minister exactly a week ago when Ulster's cash-hit health service received additional funding of £5.2 million to be shared among the four health boards to help them buy a range of elective services. Some of the patients, who have been waiting too long for operations, will now receive long-awaited surgery, but waiting lists are still too large and patients have to wait too long for the problem to be resolved by piecemeal funding in response to all-party representation or press and media attention directed at the Department of Health and the Minister.
We welcome the Minister's response, but I hope that he will acknowledge that Members of Parliament who represent Northern Ireland constituencies have been pressed forcefully by their constituents, who are enraged to learn that surgery was on offer and was being sold to patients in the Republic of Ireland while British citizens who have paid taxes and national insurance were left on
waiting lists because health authorities and fundholders could not pay for the operations to which their patients were entitled. Many are afraid to be named lest they suffer further delay. My colleagues and I want to see such future funding as is necessary to eliminate unreasonable waiting times for any patients in Northern Ireland. When the waiting lists have been cleared, nobody would object to the expert services still available being sold on to relieve the suffering of patients from outside Northern Ireland.
Further evidence of crisis in hospital provision was highlighted in the Belfast Telegraph on 6 February. The article, which was entitled "Cancer unit in crisis", highlighted the threat that existed for Northern Ireland cancer patients at the Province's regional cancer centre because of the overwork and maximum use being made of the special diagnostic simulator machine at Belvoir Park. It is the only one of its kind in the Province and had had problems earlier this year. There were genuine fears of a more serious breakdown that would have delayed urgently needed diagnosis and treatment.
Cancer patients and their families throughout Northern Ireland are deeply grateful to the anonymous donor whose generous gift of £400,000 will provide a new diagnostic simulator. We all appreciate the fact that its £250,000 installation costs have been made available by the Department of Health, which has been shamed into finding that money by the generosity of the anonymous donor. The investment could save lives, because earlier diagnosis and treatment will become available when the second simulator is in use.
The perception of a growing crisis in our health and social services provision in Northern Ireland has been expressed by patients, medical practitioners, trade unionists, and by the Royal College of Nursing, the largest professional working group in the NHS. The public at large want to see the nurses in our hospitals and those who are employed elsewhere in the health service properly rewarded for their care and devotion, without long-drawn-out pay negotiations.
My constituents in East Antrim are dismayed because no improvement was made to the A8 from Larne to Ballynure, before Moyle hospital at Larne was closed. No improvements to the road have been made since the hospital closed, either. Are any improvements even being considered, either now or in the future, to make access to the Antrim hospital faster and safer for motorists and ambulances travelling from the Larne borough area?
What assurance can the Minister give that congestion on the A2 between Carrickfergus and Belfast will be relieved in the not too distant future? Again, that would provide faster and safer access for my constituents in Islandmagee, Whitehead, Carrickfergus, Greenisland and Newtownabbey to the Whiteabbey and Belfast hospitals. Can the Minister assure me that he will continue to support the retention and upgrading of the existing services at Whiteabbey hospital in my constituency, which must not be run down in order to fund the failure to rationalise hospital provision in Belfast?
The most recent figures for admissions to Northern Ireland hospitals, published in columns 443-44 of Hansard on 18 November 1996, show how long patients had waited for admission. It should be of concern to all of us that although by March 1996 progress had been made to clear up most of the backlog of patients who had waited more than two years, 800 patients had still waited longer than 18 months at that time.
Can the Minister report significant progress over the past year in reducing the number of patients who have been on waiting lists for more than 18 months? Is the inability of health boards and fundholders to pay for operations creating another backlog of non-urgent operations for the future? Is the failure to fund the number of operations that our hospitals are capable of carrying out part of a deliberate strategy designed to reduce the number of acute hospitals in Northern Ireland?
Can the Minister assure us that patients who do not wish to be placed in mixed-sex wards will have their wishes respected, and will be allowed to retain their dignity and their right to privacy in single-sex wards?
Will the Minister, together with representatives of the Northern Ireland ambulance service and the hospital trusts that serve my constituents and others, set aside some time on a regular basis to discuss matters with the chief executives, and to examine for himself examples of the appalling incidents that have occurred and keep occurring, causing distress and suffering to young and elderly patients alike?
The Minister would not normally have sight of those horror stories, because in such cases my colleagues and I now write to the chief executives of the appropriate bodies, but a debate such as this affords us the opportunity to raise them in the Chamber.
Why should a pensioner who fell and broke her thighbone on Friday night have to lie in agony on a hospital bed until Monday before being transferred to Belfast city hospital for treatment? Are there no proper facilities for treating patients, whether pensioners or not, at weekends? There was a good final outcome to the case, and the patient made a good recovery.
Is not the following story a disgraceful example of the falling level of provision in our health service? An 80-year-old woman suffering from an acute kidney infection was, on her doctor's advice, conveyed by emergency ambulance to hospital at 4.24 in the afternoon. She was accompanied by her husband, and was wearing a coat and slippers but no stockings. She was discharged at 5.40 and informed that there was no ambulance to take her home.
The patient and her husband, who was also 80, waited while a nurse tried to contact a relative, but gave up and set off on their own. There was no taxi rank in the vicinity of the hospital, and they walked a considerable distance on a freezing cold night to a railway station where they waited for an hour to make part of their journey by train, and then found a taxi in which to complete the journey on that wintry night, arriving home two and a half hours after the woman had been discharged from hospital.
Last year, a man took his six-year-old grandson, who had broken his arm, to Antrim hospital. The waiting time for an X-ray was an hour, after which he was advised that the staff present could not set the child's arm and the grandfather would have to take him to the Royal Victoria hospital.
Unfortunately, six or seven weeks ago, the same man's eight-year-old grandson had to be taken from Larne to the Antrim hospital, where, after an X-ray, a fractured ankle was diagnosed. Again, there was no one present to set the child's ankle and the grandfather had to drive to the Royal Victoria hospital.
I hope that the Minister will take time to examine those cases and that, even though there were apologies and excuses, he will ensure that there is no repetition of such incidents.
Not everything in Northern Ireland is gloom and doom, however. I am sure that the Minister will join me in congratulating Londonderry-born Dr. Peter O'Hare and Gill Elliot from Belfast--two Ulster scientists whose recent breakthrough has been hailed as one of the most important in gene therapy, and a major step on the way to combating several diseases, including cancer.
I hope that there will be close collaboration between those involved in cancer research at Queen's university Belfast, the new state-of-the-art cancer research unit of the Ulster Cancer Foundation at Belfast city hospital, and the Marie Curie research institute in Surrey, where the characteristics of the mystery protein VP22 were discovered for the first time.
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