Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Dinenage]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. She is absolutely right to highlight the fact that any form of disability can cause social isolation and loneliness, but hearing loss and deafness can do so almost more than anything else. I pay massive tribute to the incredible work that she did as Minister for sport and civil society to further this. I am a keen member of the inter-ministerial group on hearing loss, which does so much to further that aim and aspiration.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

North Staffordshire clinical commissioning group is the only CCG in the country to restrict hearing aids. It is about to launch its consultation to ensure that all my constituents can get hearing aids when they need them. Does the Minister agree that it should be compliant with NICE guidelines?

[Caroline Dinenage]

The hon. Lady is absolutely to raise that. CCGs are responsible for the commissioning of NHS audiology services, including the provision of hearing aids. We expect all CCGs to have regard to the NICE clinical guidance when commissioning services for their local population.

Safeguarding Vulnerable Adults: Care Homes

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Allin-Khan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that this is about scrutiny, but it is also about saying that a Care Quality Commission rating is not good enough, because vulnerable patients cannot articulate their needs, fill in forms or speak the truth accurately to a shiny inspection team when a care facility prepares for their arrival.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is brave to make a speech in the Chamber about her personal experiences. Does she agree that one of the most disconcerting things about what has happened to her family is to think about the impact on other families who are not as well informed or as articulate and who do not have a doctor or MP in the family? They will be vulnerable and distraught, but they will not have the opportunity to engage in the same way as my hon. Friend.

[Dr Allin-Khan]

It is for the very reasons that my hon. Friend so beautifully articulates that I am using this platform to raise this issue. This is no longer about my father; this is about every single member of our society—the veterans who fought in our wars, the older people who worked so hard for us to enjoy the liberty that we have today. I am speaking about this for our families, friends, neighbours, loved ones and the people to whom we owe our lives.

Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Tuesday 19th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine]

I certainly would, as someone who used to work in the golf industry before coming to the House. I was at Wentworth last month for the PGA, and a good example of what my hon. Friend refers to is a social enterprise that I met called Golf in Society led by an inspirational chap called Anthony Blackburn. He founded a project at Lincoln Golf Centre that works with people with dementia and Parkinson’s disease to show that golf is one of the best leisure activities out there, and gives people with those long-term conditions a sense that their life is not over and that they can still play golf, and play it rather well—probably better than me.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

In 2016, Stoke-on-Trent was the European city of sport, but it faces some of the highest health inequalities in the country. The Stoke newspaper The Sentinel highlighted the power of exercise in its recent NHS SOS campaign. Will the Minister meet the editor Martin Tideswell and my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) to receive details of that incredibly important local campaign?

[Steve Brine]

I am aware of that campaign. Something that we want to see in schools across the country, including in Stoke, is the Golden Mile. I see good examples in schools in my constituency and across the country when I travel. We are interested to learn more about what Stoke has done on this subject.

NHS Staff Pay

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Wednesday 21st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for that, and I pay tribute to Janet Davies, the boss of the RCN, who has worked very hard to make this deal happen and in the best interests of her profession.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

My healthcare economy was held together over the winter solely by the good will of NHS workers, yet they have had a 14% pay cut in real terms since 2010. This announcement is a drop in the ocean. How does the Secretary of State think that it will help retention rates?

[Mr Hunt]

I cannot agree that this is a drop in the ocean. If the hon. Lady does not want to hear it from me, let me point out what was said by the Unison head of health, Sara Gorton, who is also the head negotiator for the NHS unions. She said that the deal

“would go a long way towards making dedicated health staff feel more valued, lift flagging morale, and help turn the tide on employers’ staffing problems.”

That is not a drop in the ocean.

NHS Winter Crisis

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

Let me make a little progress, if I may. I will try to take as many interventions as possible, but this is only a half-day debate and I know that many people want to speak.

We have heard the stories of ambulances backed up outside hospitals. Ambulances have been diverted from gridlocked A&E departments 150 times. Our hospitals are overcrowded and our bed occupancy levels are running at unsafe levels. In the run-up to Christmas eve, over one third of England’s children’s care units were 100% full, with not a single spare bed. We have had reports of whole children’s wards being used for adults. In fact, we do not know the full scale of the crisis because this year NHS England is not reporting which hospital trusts have issued the OPEL—operational pressures escalation levels—alerts revealing hospital pressures. I hope that, given the Secretary of State’s keenness on a duty of candour, he will explain why the OPEL data is not being collected and published nationally for England, as it has been in recent years.

But of course behind every single one of these statistics is a real human story. We have heard stories of elderly, fragile patients treated in the backs of ambulances in the freezing January weather, or elderly patients, sometimes confused, languishing on trolleys in corridors, such as the 80-year-old epileptic man with severe dementia who was stuck on a trolley for 36 hours waiting to be treated at the Royal Stoke. His daughter, Jackie Weaver, said:

“it was absolutely horrendous. You couldn’t get past for all the trolleys”.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Jonathan Ashworth]

Given that this is about Stoke, I will give way.

[Ruth Smeeth]

We had 67 people sitting on trolleys. We ran out of corridor space. Two hundred people medically fit for discharge had nowhere to go. The pressure on my constituents and those of my hon. Friends in north Staffordshire was appalling, but so was the pressure on the staff who had to cope with looking after those patients. My constituents deserve better and the staff deserve better. We need money for social care—and we needed it last year.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend makes a moving contribution to the debate. Those people in Stoke whose relatives have been waiting so long on corridors will see the Prime Minister saying, “Nothing is perfect,” but the truth is that we do not want perfection—we just want a bit of dignity and humanity in our health service.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Ashworth]

Absolutely. Bed occupancy rates at such a level are unsafe. I know the Secretary of State is committed to patient safety—he has made it one of his signature issues—yet he is presiding over a health service in which bed occupancy in acute hospitals is routinely well over 85%.

We have heard about the pressures in South Yorkshire, but what about the pressures in West Yorkshire? Of the hospital ward in Pinderfields where people were left lying on the floor, a witness said:

“The man who was lying on the floor at the bottom of my husband’s bed was being sick. He was asking for a trolley to lie on but there wasn’t one to give him.”

Of course, their plight was dismissed in the House on Monday by the then Minister, the hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr Dunne), who told us there were enough chairs to sit on.

[Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I will give way to the local MP, and I will then try to make some progress.

Healthcare: North Staffordshire

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Snell]

The hon. Gentleman asks the excellent question of what cause we attribute the situation to. I am hesitant to give an answer that points the finger of blame. One reason why north Staffordshire and Staffordshire as a whole have failed to remedy the problem is that there has been a game of pass the buck in determining who is responsible for not achieving what. That means that nobody has taken responsibility. One issue in Staffordshire is industrial disease, which has caused us not to meet A&E waiting times because people who cannot get the secondary healthcare they want present to A&E with their problems. That means that we have missed both the four-hour and 12-hour A&E targets. Although we have met six of the seven targets on cancer waiting times, we are still short on one.

The hon. Gentleman’s question is pertinent because we have a hospital that already has a deficit and has been challenged to make £60 million of savings this year and a further £70 million in the next two years, and North Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent clinical commissioning groups have decided that the best way to help that hospital, when it is struggling to meet those targets, is to fine it an additional £10 million. I do not understand the logic of taking a fine of £10 million from an organisation that is already struggling to deliver the services with the cash that it has.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, in spite of all the efficiencies that are being made by the chief executive of our hospital, the reward is that the percentage cuts are deeper at Royal Stoke and University Hospitals of North Midlands than at any other hospital in the country? That is not a reward for the efforts that are being made to provide decent healthcare provision for our constituents.

[Gareth Snell]

I am usually pleased to see Stoke-on-Trent at the top of a leader board, but the one that my hon. Friend highlights is not one that we should be proud to top. She demonstrates the perverse and farcical nature of a funding system that targets those who have the least by penalising them further financially. That will simply compound the problem in the healthcare system in north Staffordshire, which will impact on the wider Staffordshire health economy and cause greater problems for her constituents, my constituents and the constituents of the hon. Member for Stafford.

To give credit where it is due, the Government have offered £530,000 of additional funding to help with the potential crisis this winter. Again, that shows the perverse nature of the funding situation. On the one hand, we are asked to make huge cuts in the tens of millions, yet the Government recognise that the winter will be challenging and offer half a million pounds back. It seems that money is circulated around the system, but those who need it most—the constituents we represent—are unable to get the support they need.

The problems with A&E in Stoke-on-Trent have been compounded by the loss of 168 community care beds at various community hospitals around north Staffordshire. The decision was made by the clinical commissioning group 18 or so months ago to move towards a “My Care, My Way—Home First” pathway, whereby people would be discharged from the hospital straight to their home, without the need for a step-down continuing care facility. We were told that that would revolutionise the way care was provided in north Staffordshire. However, we know that one of the things that is causing delays in our A&E and financial problems in our hospital is that the number of people who are declared medically fit for discharge but are unable to leave an acute bed because no care package is available in the community sector is growing. The hospital will tell us that. Stoke-on-Trent City Council is recruiting more care workers, but the package of care needed for those people is becoming more and more acute, and more and more difficult, meaning that private providers are simply turning away potential patients because they do not see them as profitable customers.

The community care bed scenario highlights what I think is a grave travesty in the way the health sector is now run. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 created clinical commissioning groups. In Staffordshire, we used to have three primary care trusts. They came to the conclusion that working as one cluster was the best way forward; that pooling their resources and working collectively for the greater good of the 1.1 million in our county and city was the way forward. The Health and Social Care Act then created six clinical commissioning groups, who have now decided that the best way forward is to have one accountable officer and to work together for the benefit of the 1.1 million residents who live in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire. I ask the Minister how is it possible that we have gone from a system of three PCTs to one PCT and from six CCGs to one accountable officer for CCGs—with all the money spent on reforming those services—when clinicians, Members of Parliament, councillors and patient groups were telling the Minister and the Government that that was the best way forward?

We now have a situation where NHS England has decided that the original consultation on the closure of those beds was not up to standard and ordered it to be re-consulted on, meaning that 168 community care beds will sit mothballed this winter—not formally decommissioned, but mothballed—while a second consultation takes place on whether they should exist at all. At the same time, the Government recognise that there will be an acute pressure on A&E in Royal Stoke Hospital that requires a half a million pound investment.

[Ruth Smeeth]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the most ludicrous parts of the game that has gone on with our community health beds is that the nursing staff who provide the services have been made redundant in advance of the end date of the consultation? Even if the consultation finds that the beds are necessary, the staff have been made redundant in advance of the decision. That is a ludicrous way to treat the workforce.

[Gareth Snell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I could not agree more. As a former trade union official with Unison, I think the way the staff have been treated is simply unacceptable. It is also an additional cost burden. Staff have been made redundant at a cost to the clinical commissioning groups, which may find that the work they were doing is brought back into use if the consultation suggests the beds should exist. Again, I ask the Minister to provide some rationale as to why that is an effective use of public money in a healthcare system that we all agree is overspending and needs to find a way of closing its budget gap.

It is all too easy to point at Royal Stoke Hospital and say, “The hospital is the problem; fix the hospital and everything else will sort itself out”. That is partly true, but there are also issues around our capped expenditure programme. Over the next two years, Staffordshire is being asked to take £160 million out of its broader healthcare economy spending. A sustainability and transformation plan identified a deficit of almost half a billion pounds by 2022, yet the way to deal with that appears to be a disjointed approach to solving little problems in little areas without any reasonable thought about the way forward and how this can be redressed.

I go back to the community care beds. They provided a platform whereby people who were in an acute expensive setting could be discharged, at a point of being considered medically fit for discharge, to a provision that was designed to give them the care they needed before they transitioned to their home, a private care provider or a council-run care facility. That allowed them to make the change without the prospect of them re-presenting, at the expense of the acute system, because they had been discharged too quickly. Again, this is money circulating around a system that is identifiable as waste in many people’s considerations of what waste is, while at the same time it is being manufactured by the decisions of the CCG.

The CCG’s decision on community care beds was referred to the Minister under paragraph 29(6) of the 2013 regulation almost a year ago. Letters from myself and my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth), which were countersigned by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly), Baroness Golding and the former Member for Stoke-on-Trent South, Mr Flello, have gone unanswered. I have raised the issue here as a point of order and at business questions, and I have asked the Secretary of State directly when we will get that response, but to date we still have had none. That is almost a year of referrals from the two tier 1 authorities and of unanswered parliamentary requests. It is creating an unacceptable level of uncertainty in the economics of the health service in Staffordshire.