I could not agree with my hon. Friend more.
The decision flies in the face of a fundamental aspect of the NHS constitution: patient choice. The JCPCT asserts that Newcastle could reach the minimum number of procedures if parents are “properly managed” to go to there. That is simply unacceptable. The whole point of patient choice is that people decide where they want to go.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) said, the review ignored a petition of 600,000 people, counting it as only one response, when 22,000 text messages in support of the Birmingham unit were counted as 22,000 separate responses. Why was that?
The scores in the review were allocated to four bands. Each of the points from one to four were multiplied by the weighting. That gave 286 points to Newcastle and 239 points to Leeds. However, there was no clarification of how the figures had been arrived at. Also the figures were not definite, but were rounded up or down, which may have made a huge difference to the outcome.
As has been mentioned, clinical experts at the BCCA, the Bristol inquiry, the Paediatric Intensive Care Society and the Association of Cardiothoracic Anaesthetists all say that surgical centres should be chosen on the basis of their having paediatric services all on one site. That is something that we enjoy in Leeds, which has a wonderful children’s hospital with all the services that are needed. On meeting such children, it is clear that they need the support not just of heart surgeons, but of other experts. In Newcastle, the extra support will be some 3 miles away. There will therefore be a worse service for people who live in and around Yorkshire, not the world-class service that we all want.
There is much more detail that I would like to go into. I sincerely hope that we will have a Back-Bench debate on this issue when we come back in the autumn, because it is of grave concern to hundreds of thousands of people in the Yorkshire region. We will not give up our fight to save our unit.
3.16 pm