Thank you for calling me to contribute to this debate, Mr Speaker. I am sorry that the shadow Health Secretary is not in his place. After repeatedly refusing to take any interventions from me during his lengthy speech, he said that I would have time to make my contribution later, and I wish he was here to hear it, because I will be referring to him and seeking his help and support.
I approach this debate with mixed emotions. I am extremely sorry about the need for the Francis report in the first instance and believe that there remain serious questions about why there was such a long delay before a thorough investigation took place into the lack of care and the misconduct at Mid Staffs. I pay particular
tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) for his contribution earlier and for the role he has played in pursuing this matter right through to the end, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) for his contribution and for raising this matter from the outset. My heart goes out to those who suffered needlessly and to their families who campaigned for so long. It is also worth remembering that for every one person who went public and put their head above the parapet, there are probably tens who stayed quiet and are probably still silent on issues that will have affronted them.
On a positive note, I am pleased about the progress made over the past 12 months. I am also pleased about the strong action has been taken by the previous Health Secretary and by this one, and about the leadership and determination that the Prime Minister showed at the outset in 2010 in seeking to root out the issues. The present Health Secretary has taken direct action to ensure: that nursing numbers are published; that there is data transparency; that details on surgery outcomes by consultant will be available for inspection; and that named consultants will be available for older patients. Those positive interventions will make a significant difference and will go a long way to preventing any recurrence.
Ultimately, the staff involved deserve the credit for the change, but the Health Secretary has been key to being the patients’ champion. A culture has developed where we can rightly champion the NHS and can even question it. We have now come to a point where we can criticise the NHS without being seen as undermining it. All of the best organisations welcome feedback, particularly negative feedback, because it gives the best chance of putting problems right to prevent any recurrence.However, my mixed emotions are far more complex than that. As I see changes and improvements taking place in England, I remain concerned about what is happening to the national health service in Wales and the impact that that is having on my constituents. It is quite obvious from this debate that the concerns that have been raised are shared by Members on both sides of the House, which is something that we should view positively. However, I am not so sure that those concerns are shared in all quarters, especially by Members on the Labour Front Bench. Again, I must pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) for her determination and persistence in rooting out these issues wherever they occur—be it in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland or England.
It is fair to say that political points can be made about the cuts to the NHS budget in Wales, but I fear that the situation is even more serious and dangerous than that. Any criticism of the NHS in Wales is now dismissed as party political or politically motivated. It is the identical culture that existed at the time of the Mid Staffordshire crisis.
Only two weeks ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie) discovered that Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS medical director in England, had last November written to his counterpart in Wales, Dr Chris Jones, raising concerns about the mortality rates at some Welsh hospitals—at six in particular. It has now come to light that that action was prompted by the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley. In the e-mail, Professor Keogh, who had investigated 14 hospitals in England for the same reason, offered his assistance. I
have a copy of his letter here. It was not a criticism; it merely questioned the data and offered help should there be any need for further investigation.
There was no response from Dr Jones, which is worrying in itself. Most alarming, however, was the response from the Welsh Health Minister when the matter became public. Mark Drakeford rightly pointed out that simple comparisons cannot be made because of the different ways in which data are collected. However, in response to calls for an inquiry, he said that he was “coldly furious” and that it was
“a concerted political attempt by the Conservative Party to drag the Welsh NHS through the mud.”
He even had the audacity to accuse the NHS in England of being in crisis. He clearly felt that attack was the best form of defence. What worries me most is the blatant rebuttal without wider consideration. The politics appear to be more important than the patients. This was a letter from one clinician to another, yet it was a politician using every political tactic possible to undermine its contents.
A pragmatic approach would have been to point out the differences in the collection of the data and to have reassured patients. I suspect that the reality was that the Welsh Health Minister was responding in the full knowledge of all the other statistics on the NHS in Wales, such as those on waiting times and diagnostic delays, which could well contribute to higher mortality rates. Again, a pragmatic approach would have been to announce an investigation, or at least to seek out the root causes of the apparent high mortality rate according to the way in which the data were collected.
It is ironic that the Welsh Health Minister has today announced a change in the way the data are collected. Obviously, that is some shift, but I note that it has come out only after the political games had taken place. It is two weeks since my constituents were alarmed by the accusations that I had dragged the Welsh NHS through the mud.
In researching for this debate, I looked at recent cases that have become public in the NHS in Wales. There are troubling similarities with those that led to the Francis report. Lilian Hopkins received treatment from a local health board that treats patients from my constituency. For several days, a sign was left above her bed that said “Nil by mouth”. That left Mrs Hopkins too weak to lift a glass of water. Her prosthetic limb was not removed for two weeks, when she was left in bed for that time. Screams of pain at night were treated with sedation. At an earlier date, her family had asked for an investigation. It was promised, but not conducted. Three nurses have been arrested for falsifying records.
This is the same local health board where the police are investigating the circumstances surrounding a man who waited four hours in an ambulance outside the hospital, only to die at the same A and E department some hours later. The right hon. Member for Cynon Valley has listed several examples that I could refer to, but these are examples that I have picked up in the past couple of weeks.
The Royal College of Surgeons published a report last July that claimed that 152 patients have died over the past five years while waiting for cardiac surgery across two local health boards alone in Wales. The royal college also stated in its report that 2,000 cardiac operations were either cancelled or not scheduled between January
and March last year. The report says that south Wales is the only part of the UK where patients are regularly dying on cardiac surgery waiting lists. It says that the provision of urgent and emergency surgery is simply inadequate.
I should like to be able to report that the situation has improved since the publication of that report last July, but it has not. Some patients are now being sent across the border to England to be treated in the independent sector, which strikes me as emergency action; instead, attempts should be made to identify the culture and issues that potentially parallel the Mid Staffordshire crisis.
I could point to lots of data, but I shall pick up just a few of the differences between Wales and England. Urgent cancer waiting times have not been met in Wales for the past five years. On average response times, in Wales 58% of patients are seen within eight minutes in category A calls. In England, the figure is 72%. One of the most worrying statistics, which Professor Sir Bruce Keogh particularly identified, relates to diagnostic services. In his e-mail, he pointed to the statistic that in Wales 26,000 patients are waiting more than eight weeks for diagnostic services. In England, 9,000 patients are waiting longer than six weeks. We need to bear in mind the difference between the populations: 3 million people in Wales and 50 million in England, yet 26,000 people are waiting for diagnostic services in Wales and 9,000 waiting in England. The statistics speak for themselves.
Peter Watkin Jones, a lawyer involved with the Mid Staffs inquiry, has said that a culture change was needed in the NHS in Wales. Having heard the shadow Health Secretary’s contribution, I do not think he recognises that. Again, I was sorry he felt that attack was the best form of defence. The right hon. Member for Cynon Valley has said that high mortality rates are a smoke signal indicating that something is wrong. The Royal College of Nursing has said that its members do not always have time for training and staff development in Welsh hospitals.
If the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) genuinely wants the lessons of Mid Staffs to be learned, if he wants to ensure that patients in Wales do not have to suffer the same indignity and if he wants to play a positive role in informing health care across the UK, I ask him to agree to make every effort to influence his colleagues in Wales to respond positively to the questions that are being asked, to put party politics aside and to introduce an effective inquiry for the sake of my constituents and those across the whole of Wales; otherwise, everything that he has said today will simply be hollow.
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