The right hon. Gentleman asks a number of questions. I am still not clear about his position and whether he thinks that the public inquiry was the right decision or not. The inquiry led to recommendations and the improvements we have seen. To answer his question about whether “the TSA process was worth it”—that was the phrase he used—as we speak in the Chamber today, my local hospital is 50% empty. Cannock Chase hospital was run down by the management of Mid Staffs to near closure, and half of it lies empty. Any building that is half empty has a sword of Damocles
hanging over it, and no one from the Opposition complained locally as services were slowly stripped out by stealth over the past 10 years. As a result of the TSA process, Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust will take over running of Cannock hospital, increase utilisation from 50% to 100%, and invest £20 million in refurbishing it. That shows that the TSA process has been fantastic from a Cannock Chase perspective, even though it has been a stressful and drawn-out process.
I praise my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford for his tireless work on this issue and for his technical and clinical knowledge of local services, which is second to none in the House. His campaigning has led us a long way from the point at which A and E, maternity and paediatrics would all be closed, which is a hell of a legacy of public service to the people of Stafford who, I am sure, will return him at the next election for a second term—one which I hope is not dominated by the issue of Stafford hospital, as his first term has been.
As we know, the Government introduced measures in the Care Bill as their legislative response to the Francis inquiry. Those measures include the introduction of Ofsted-style ratings for hospitals and care homes, creating a single regime to deal with financial and care failures at NHS hospitals, introducing a duty of candour, and making it a criminal offence for care providers to give false and misleading information about their performance. It may surprise many that those measures do not already exist. Local parents in my constituency send their children to schools in Cannock that have an Ofsted rating, and they can speak to teachers about any documented problems in the school. Those same parents take their elderly relatives to Stafford hospital and are surprised when they receive appalling care—indeed, some even die suddenly—because there is simply no clear ranking of how that hospital is performing as there is for their children’s school.
Worse still, nursing management and staff had actively been covering up the problems. As we have seen locally, the events at Mid Staffs clearly demonstrate that a culture had been allowed to develop in the NHS in which defensiveness and secrecy were put ahead of patient care. Think about that for a moment: they were put ahead of patient care. In the 21st century, is that not a damning indictment of an institution that was set up to improve the health of its people, but has been encouraged over the years to protect itself and its reputation more than the people it exists to serve? I think that all Members should reflect on that before rushing to defend the reputation of the NHS. We should remember why the NHS exists: to serve the patients, not itself or any political party.
In the time available, I want to talk about two things: prioritising the patient experience and the TSA process. Before doing so, I think that it is worth remembering how we got to this point today. Macmillan Cancer Support’s briefing for this debate, which the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) has already quoted, gets it spot on:
“The failure at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust to put patients and their priorities at the centre of their work was a key finding from Robert Francis’ report… In particular, the report found that the trust prioritised its finances and Foundation Trust application over providing a high quality of care that put patients first.”
To quote a source that we on the Government side of the House all read regularly, the World Socialist Web Site:
“Under the 1997-2010 Labour government, Stafford was pressured to transform into a Foundation Trust—an initiative aimed at making hospitals semi-independent of the Department of Health by ‘freeing’ them to find private funding sources. In the process, £10 million was cut from the Trust’s budget and 150 jobs lost, leading to nursing staff shortages, overwork and the inability to provide a high-quality service to vulnerable patients. Any excess deaths at the hospital must be attributed to this shift.”