It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) for securing this important debate. We both have a background of working in healthcare and we share an interest in health issues, particularly when it comes to health inequalities and postcode lotteries of healthcare provision.
As my hon. Friend said, we recently visited the excellent diabetic foot clinic at King’s College hospital. I will be honest: when I received the invitation, it was only my interest in diabetes that led to my accepting it. I did not expect to come away from a diabetic foot clinic feeling inspired, but inspired I most certainly was. I spoke to the doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants, researchers and, most importantly, the patients. I heard from patients whose limbs had been saved from amputation by the amazingly skilled, dedicated and knowledgeable staff—patients who had arrived at the foot clinic clutching letters from their doctors that stated, “There is no alternative other than to amputate this limb.” Those patients were lucky because they had talked to people such as diabetes specialist nurses, who had suggested that they consult the diabetic foot clinic to get a second opinion.
We spoke to a farmer from Kent who had been kicked by one of his cows. He had a wound on his foot that would not heal and he had been advised by the hospital that a below-knee amputation was the only solution. The farmer talked to us about his family farm, about how he would have been unable to carry on working had the amputation gone ahead and about how grateful he was for his referral to the foot clinic. The staff there had been able to treat the wound and it was well on the way to recovery by the time we saw it. They had saved his limb and consequently his business and his family’s livelihood, with all the concomitant savings to the NHS. So many of the people we spoke to told us stories like that; he was just one of them.
I was absolutely blown away by the incredible work done by that clinic, but, as has been pointed out, the care provided there is not universal and there are currently no national drivers to lower amputation rates across the country. It has already been stated that four out of five of these amputations are avoidable. I particularly liked the comment by the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) that we should aim to get to a point at which amputation is seen as a failure rather than as a form of treatment.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury has quoted quite a lot of my speech. [Laughter.] So I will be brief. She referred to this, but it deserves repetition. In 2013, the Health Secretary committed to reducing the rate of diabetes-related amputations by 50% over five years.
The amputation rate has in fact remained steady. Little progress appears to have been made towards the commitment. I do not think it does any harm to repeat that point and to hope for a response.