Congenital Cardiac Services for Children

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

I will try to keep my remarks as brief as possible to allow other hon. Members to have their say. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), who secured the debate, and all the other Members who have supported him. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing the subject to be debated in the main Chamber.

I shall speak in favour of the motion. I was first contacted about the issue shortly after the election, and I should like to thank in particular the Russell family in Loughborough for bringing it to my attention. The review is called Safe and Sustainable for a good reason, and I entirely endorse the statement that all hon. Members probably received from the Little Hearts Matter campaign that the review offers a monumental opportunity to ensure that every child with a heart problem has access to the best heart surgery service that this country can offer. I am sure that that is what we all want.

I am, however, concerned by a few comments made by Opposition Members and in a recent article in The Times, which seemed to question why MPs felt the need to defend their local services whenever a reconfiguration is suggested. That is a misunderstanding of the role of 21st century Members of Parliament, however long ago they were elected. We are here to speak up on behalf of our constituents. I am sure that all hon. Members here today and those who cannot be here have been contacted by constituents who are concerned about their access or that of their children and grandchildren—those born and not yet born—to heart surgery should the need arise. It is absolutely our duty to stand up for that and to ask whether the review and the options are right. However, I am very pleased that, as a Member of Parliament, I am not the one making the final decisions.

As I said, I support option A, as do my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr Dorrell) and the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth). I am sure that, although the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) will focus on the national perspective, she will manage to get in a reference to Glenfield hospital somewhere in her concluding remarks. That hospital serves my constituents extremely well and I am in awe and admiration of those who work there—the surgeons, those who run intensive care units, all the nurses, and the many staff who packed the Walkers stadium for two consultation meetings last Thursday. Option A is the highest scoring option and the most cost-effective.

In the time available I want to talk about a topic that the hon. Member for Leicester South touched on—the ECMO services at Glenfield hospital. The hospital treated many of the patients who had swine flu over the winter, and the national leaders of the NHS said that the nation owed Leicester a debt of gratitude for the work that it had done with ECMO. My worry about the review—if option A were successful, I would not have this worry—is that we have a clinically excellent service in ECMO and I do not want to see that jeopardised in any way. As has been said, if the children’s ECMO service is moved, that will inevitably have an impact on the adult ECMO services. We should be very careful in this country about not respecting such clinically excellent services. We should allow them to continue in places where the staff are already well trained and well versed and offer a service of national importance.

My final point, which the Minister addressed—I am grateful to him—is about translation. There are a large number of ethnic minority people in Leicester and in my constituency of Loughborough. My right hon. Friend the Minister generously acknowledged the fact that it would have been helpful if the documents had been translated earlier. The question posed by hon. Members in the debate is whether that impacts on the fairness of the review and the way the process has been carried out. That is clearly for others to judge. It will be interesting to see how many people reply using documents that have been translated.

The timeline in the consultation document shows that the process has been going on for a long time, so it should not have been beyond the wit of man or of the review committee to realise that many of the services are located in areas where there are high ethnic minority populations, and that those documents should have been translated early enough to make sure that members of those populations could play their full part in making their views heard.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—