Mental Health and NHS Performance
Matt Warman Excerpts(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Hunt
The hon. Lady is right to say that we need better alternatives to A&E for people such as her constituent. Sometimes those do not exist, but one thing we need to do is make sure that people who call 111 and need to speak to a clinician can do so quickly. One thing we have piloted successfully in other parts of the country is better GP supervision of people in care homes, who are sometimes the most vulnerable patients. We are looking at all these things, but on the broad direction of travel she is right to say that we need to find a better way forward for people such as her constituent.
Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
In sparsely populated rural Lincolnshire, vital reforms of health and social care risk being undermined by the performance of East Midlands ambulance service. Our police and crime commissioner says that his officers are routinely acting, in effect, as ambulance drivers. I know the Secretary of State understands the problems we face in rural Lincolnshire, but does he agree that, as currently constituted, East Midlands ambulance service is not serving the rural parts of its area as well as its staff want to and as well as my constituents need it to?
Mr Hunt
As we discussed earlier when my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) spoke, there are places where the service that the ambulance service provides to rural areas is not as good as it should be, sometimes because of the perverse incentives relating to how the targets work. I have been nervous about changing the targets, because that can sometimes be taken as a signal to relax and I am absolutely determined that we should meet the current targets, but I did make a commitment to him that I would look into this issue and I will do so.
Oral Answers to Questions
Matt Warman Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Mr Jeremy Hunt
What I can tell the hon. Lady—who, I know, rightly campaigns hard on mental health—is that we are treating 1,400 more people in our mental health services every day than we did in 2010, and we will be treating a million more people every year when we have implemented the taskforce report. We are investing more, and we are making good progress.
Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
Shared care allows GPs to provide complex prescriptions for drugs such as methotrexate, but in my constituency the Beacon surgery recently withdrew from those arrangements. Can the Secretary of State assure me that the Department will support not only patients who now face potentially longer round trips, but GPs themselves, so that they can continue to provide those vital services?
David Mowat
The arrangement my hon. Friend describes is a special relationship whereby a GP agrees with a hospital consultant to prescribe complex drugs which are normally only hospital-prescribed. This is not part of the standard GP contract and they cannot be required to provide this service. On the specific issue raised, we have asked NHS England to determine whether there are alternatives and I will revert to my hon. Friend on that.
NHS Funding
Matt Warman Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mr Hunt
I just do not agree with the hon. Gentleman. I stand by the numbers. I am afraid that, on this occasion, the Health Committee got its numbers wrong. The figure of £10 billion did not come from the Government; it was a figure that the NHS said that it needed. In fact, it needed less than £10 billion and we are delivering more than was asked for—something that the Labour party was not prepared to do.
Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
The Secretary of State has taken an interest in the rurality and sparsity that hospitals in Lincolnshire wrestle with. Will he confirm that it is because this Government are spending half a trillion pounds on the NHS over the course of this Parliament that workers and patients at Pilgrim hospital, for example, can be confident about the hospital’s future?
Mr Hunt
All NHS facilities in my hon. Friend’s constituency and across the country can be confident that the NHS has a bright future. In fact, if we are to deliver the NHS plan, more rural and remote places are precisely where we must pay most attention to keeping people healthy and well in their homes. That is why not only community hospitals, but GP surgeries and all the places upon which rural communities depend are a vital part of the NHS’s future.
Junior Doctors’ Contract Negotiations
Matt Warman Excerpts(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Ben Gummer
If the BMA was truly representing its members, it would be thinking about patient welfare during the strikes. Just now, we heard my colleagues describe with great eloquence the kinds of effects on individuals that a strike will cause. These strikes will get us no nearer to a solution; the only way to come to a solution is by negotiation.
Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
It is testament to the progress being made in the course of these negotiations that the BMA has cancelled some strikes and has downgraded the one we are expecting on Wednesday, but does the Minister agree that one crucial thing that would make the greater difference would be condemnation from the Opposition?
Ben Gummer
It would make a significant difference. Now that the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition is sitting on the Front Bench, he might like to take note of the fact that if we have a united political response condemning strikes that affect patients and their safety, it helps to bring negotiations to a more profitable end.
Oral Answers to Questions
Matt Warman Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Hunt
The hon. Lady cannot have it both ways. She cannot stand here and criticise cuts in nurse training but oppose the Government’s changes that mean we will be able to train 10,000 more nurses over the course of this Parliament. Let me tell her why there are 8,500 more nurses in our hospital wards since I became Health Secretary. It is because of the Francis inquiry into Mid Staffs. It is this Government that recognise the importance of good nursing in our wards. We did not sweep the problems under the carpet. She should give us credit where it is due.
Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
T7. In Boston in my constituency, as many as one in four children are classified as obese. Will the Minister reassure me that in the forthcoming obesity strategy, the Government will acknowledge that they are allowing families and, indeed, children the opportunity to take the control of their own lifestyles that will fix this problem, rather than seeking to do it for them?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Jane Ellison)
My hon. Friend is right that there is a really important role for families. More than anything, the Government want to make the healthy choice the easy choice for families. However, young children are not in control of the whole of the food environment around them, as I am sure he would acknowledge. The Government’s forthcoming strategy is focused on children. Obesity is a complex issue and, frankly, everyone needs to play their part—the Government, local government, health professionals, industry and families.
Junior Doctors’ Contracts
Matt Warman Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
My wife is a junior doctor, an F2 currently working in A&E in one of London’s busiest hospitals. I could therefore start by thanking the Secretary of State for livening up my evenings, some of my afternoons and some of my mornings. Instead, I wish to start by saying that however hard colleagues in this place may think we work, precious few of us, as politicians, will ever really understand what it is like to work 10 hours a day and longer, when there is no time to eat, drink or even use the toilet, all while making decisions that are vital for patients and where a single error is both life-threatening and career-ending. Too many doctors feel that the current health service works despite the existing outdated systems, rather than because of them. That is why I hope all parties agree that reform is vital.
The fact that people are working in such intense conditions goes some way to explaining the intense passion that has surrounded this debate. Doctors not only deserve better than the contract they are currently on, but they deserve better than the negotiating process that has turned serious attempts at reform into a debacle where a vacuum has been filled by knowing misinformation from the BMA. Although it is hugely frustrating that the BMA has told many people, wrongly, that they are in line for a 30% pay cut when many will get a 15% pay rise and that many now think the Government want to impose longer working hours when in fact they will be cut, it is understandable. I have seen precious little attempt at genuine honesty from the BMA, but nobody should forget that the union has stepped into a vacuum, and that is why I hope the BMA will come back to the table and negotiate.
We need as little politics in the NHS as possible. We surely need to accept that doctors, however angry and however misinformed, have a commitment to their patients that transcends their commitment to any one hospital, any union or any political party. The low morale that has persisted in the NHS since last winter has not been helped by a lack of negotiation, and it will not be helped by the exhausting anger of a strike. I would like to see a contract that entices people into specialties such as A&E and being a GP, in part because the latter will see fewer visiting the former, and which acknowledges that working on a Saturday morning is already the norm for thousands but says that working late on a Saturday night is distinctly antisocial. Above all, I would like to see the mature approach from the Labour party, the BMA and all those concerned that will put the NHS on a sustainable footing. We have acted in good faith and I hope that the Labour party will see that and not seek to undermine the health service to which we are all indebted.
Post Office Horizon System
Matt Warman Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Andrew Bridgen
My hon. Friend is quite right. When we hear a Post Office spokesperson stating,
“I am really sorry if people have faced lifestyle problems as a result of their having been working in Post Office branches”,
we have to wonder whether the organisation is even aware of the misery it has caused. The fact that Post Office Ltd believes that honest, decent, hard-working people losing their homes, their businesses, their savings, their reputation and, worst of all, in some cases their liberty can be quantified as a “lifestyle change” only serves to show that the organisation is not fit to conduct an inquiry into the matter.
The Post Office mediation scheme has proven to be a sham, Second Sight has proven to be far too independent for the Post Office to stand, and the disdain that has been shown to Members of this House and to sub-postmasters is a disgrace.
Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree with my constituents Mr and Mrs Hedges, who are sub-postmasters, that in this case the Post Office has treated not only them but this House with contempt?
Andrew Bridgen
Indeed. When we look at the cross-section of Members who have raised the matter, many of whom have served at the highest levels of Government, and who all believe that their constituents have been wronged, how can the Post Office believe that it can continue to sweep the matter under the carpet?
It is most interesting that after two years in which the Post Office has consistently claimed that its Horizon system software is robust and 100% reliable, I now have in my position an email clearly showing that the Post Office is now urgently seeking a replacement software system from IBM. I am sure that the Minister can draw his own conclusion from the happy coincidence that the investigation is now closed. It appears to me that it is indeed now sunset for the Horizon system.
It is therefore my belief, and the view of many Members across the House, that the matter must now be taken away from the Post Office and a judicial inquiry set up. The Post Office has abused its privileged position and sought to cover up its failings by way of a wholly non-transparent approach to the mediation process.