Junior Doctors Contract

Stephen Hammond Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

With the greatest of respect to the hon. Lady, it was not my decision to take industrial action—to ballot for industrial action without even being prepared to sit around the table and talk to the Government. We are seeing dramatic improvements in patient safety under this Government, as we face up to the many problems in care that we inherited, not just at Mid Staffs, but at many other places. I know that she cares about patient safety, so she should welcome the difficult changes we have made, one of which is to have a seven-day NHS.

[Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)]

Like many colleagues in the House, I wrote to the Secretary of State on numerous occasions over the past six months to express the concerns of local junior doctors. May I therefore congratulate him and the BMA on reaching this deal? I hope that junior doctors in Wimbledon will wholeheartedly support it. He spoke in his statement about the role of the guardian and the ability to ensure safe working hours, on behalf of both patients and doctors. Will he give a few more details about how he expects that to work?

[Mr Hunt]

Yes, I am happy to do that, and I thank my hon. Friend for a lot of his correspondence. The principle here is that junior doctors want to know that there is someone independent they can appeal to if they think they are being asked to work hours that are unsafe and which mean that they cannot look after patients in the way that they would want to because they are physically or mentally too exhausted. We would all want to make that possible, but it means that they need to have someone who is not their line manager. They will go to their line manager in the first instance, but they need to have someone independent and separate. One area where we have made the most progress during the past few months, even before the past 10 days of talks, is on establishing how these guardians can work in a way that has the trust of both the hospitals and the doctors working in them.

NHS in London

Stephen Hammond Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully]

Obviously he did not, which is why I won the election against him—[Interruption.] It is funny. I think the tale was that he resigned, but I do not know a lot of Ministers who would resign to save a hospital when they were one of the Ministers in charge. Others have reported that he was sacked. I do not know the truth, and I am not sure we will ever know.

[Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)]

For the sake of clarity, I am in the next-door seat to my hon. Friend and many of my constituents look to St Helier hospital. An outrageous campaign was run by the Labour party in 2014, completely without foundation, about the hospital closing. It was at the time of the local government elections, when the Government, all the management of St Helier and all the board papers showed that there was no plan to close the hospital. It was exactly as my hon. Friend says: a scare story.

[Paul Scully]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, and he is absolutely correct. It is why we need some degree of certainty. For many years now, we have had such things as “Better Healthcare Closer to Home” and “Better Services Better Value”—an alphabet soup of NHS changes, with no degree of certainty for residents or staff in that hospital. A lot of the BSBV review was clinician-led, but it was based on the premise that they wanted to concentrate consultants in certain places—in my case, at St George’s hospital in Tooting—because they did not have enough consultants in each of the different hospitals seeing enough of the more unusual cases; they wanted to concentrate expertise.

Imagine a whole load of politicians in Sutton telling residents time and again that the hospital is about to close, as my hon. Friend just said. Where would a newly qualified consultant want to go and practise? Would they want to go to a hospital that they are being told is about to close down, or would they go just up the road to one that receives all the plaudits and which has all the concentration of expertise? I know what I would do. If people talk down their local hospital and healthcare, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They may be in danger of getting a result that is exactly the opposite of what they seek.

Conception to Age 2: The First 1001 Days

Stephen Hammond Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Allen]

I hope that my own journey has exemplified that approach. The two reports the Prime Minister asked me to do in 2010 and 2011 were signed off, as it were, with very nice pictures of the then leaders of all the main political parties. The reports are still valid and they are still available, albeit not at all good bookshops, but if anybody who is viewing wishes to contact me, I would be very happy to share them. I hope they have been of some help and influence to the excellent “The 1001 Critical Days” campaign.

Whenever I dig out such reports, having not looked at them for a couple years, I look to see whether they are still relevant. In an opening paragraph, I use the term “early intervention” to refer to

“the general approaches, and the specific policies and programmes, which help to give children aged 0–3 the social and emotional bedrock they need to reach their full potential; and to those which help older children become the good parents of tomorrow.”

I hope that is in line with the superb work of my hon. Friend, the influential former Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Committee.

For me, early intervention is a philosophy, not a set of programmes. It is about changing the way we do business, whether as a political party, a family, a community or an individual. That philosophy is essentially about giving the nought-to-threes the social and emotional bedrock to become great people in their own right, and to be able to grow and flourish. It is about applying what we wanted for our own children to as many children as possible, not least those throughout the United Kingdom.

[Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Allen]

I will give way, but I hope my virtual time limit will be extended by Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Stephen Hammond]

I will be extremely brief. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about ensuring that the nought-to-threes become great people in their own right. One of the things that can help is recognition of when in the school year they were born. Does he agree that the Summer Born campaign, which wants local education authorities to properly assess children born in July and August, and the anticipated change to the code of practice, which is welcome, will help those children?

World Prematurity Day

Stephen Hammond Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, although it is not a great pleasure to listen to the debate. The quality, of course, is excellent, but the subject matter is so sad. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) for organising the debate.

It is fair to say that when our son died because he was born prematurely 15 years ago, the focus was, rightly, on the medical situation. I was extremely unwell with pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome, which is a leading cause of maternal death worldwide; I am now the patron of the charity in this country. Bliss has reported, and others will speak, about funding and skills shortages in neonatal units. My own experience is that skilled staff worked hard and did all they could for us medically. More could and probably should have been done to create memories. I have spoken and corresponded with my hon. Friend the Minister about that and hope that his excellent work on it will bear fruit. The Minister for family justice is also doing great work for the families of babies who die to ensure best practice during the cremation and burial process.

Today, I want to focus on the other medical services that can make such a difference to premature babies and their families in the long term. This is an issue of growing importance. Just as the elderly are living longer, the very young are surviving in cases where even a few years ago, they would not have done. That is, obviously, good news but, just as with the very old, prematurity presents its own challenges.

First, I turn to mental health, which my friend the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) has mentioned. According to Bliss, 40% of mothers of premature babies are affected by postnatal depression soon after birth, compared with 5% to 10% of mothers generally. For those whose babies die, I suggest that 100% need access to counselling, for both the father and the mother, and possibly for siblings and grandparents as well. It is not acceptable that on 41% of neonatal units, parents have no access to a trained mental health worker and on 30% of neonatal units, parents have no access to any psychological support at all. Not only is allowing mental health problems to go untreated needlessly cruel, but it has wider implications.

The Prime Minister made it clear how important family is to him in a speech last year, when he said that

“for those of us who want to strengthen and improve society, there is no better way than strengthening families and strengthening the relationships on which families are built.”

Sadly, however, a very large number—so large a number I am not even going to mention it—of marriages and relationships break up under the strain of a bereavement or the birth of a very sick baby, and more must be done to face that problem head-on.

[Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)]

I am on a Bill Committee upstairs, but I wanted to come down to this important debate. I raised some issues about summer-born children in a debate recently. Does my hon. Friend agree that in the long term, unless a family’s wishes about delaying the start of education are recognised, and unless that is embedded in the code by the Department for Education, significant problems will be experienced not only by the premature child but by the family?

[Victoria Prentis]

I agree, not least because I am the mother of a daughter who was born on 28 August. Although she was not premature, I am very aware of the difficulties that prematurity carries with it throughout the lives of children who are born too early.