Congenital Cardiac Services for Children

Andrew Turner Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I shall confine my speech to issues that uniquely affect my constituents. The Safe and Sustainable consultation is fundamentally flawed. Three of the four options envisage the closure of the Southampton centre. Those options are based on wrong assumptions and inaccurate data. Let me set out the background. The consultation document states:

“All options must be able to meet the minimum requirement to collect a child by ambulance…within three hours of being contacted by the referring unit”.

It then examined “detailed access mapping” using train and road journeys—that is important—and considered how existing networks were affected. More options that did not meet the “three hours” criteria were ruled out. Bristol is included in “all viable options” because south-west Cornwall and south Wales are more than three hours away from either Southampton or Birmingham.

Unfortunately, nobody in that expert team seems to have noticed that people cannot travel by train or road from the Isle of Wight. There is a clue in the name: it is an island, separated from the mainland by the Solent. I have said before that the ferries provide lifeline services for my constituents, but in this case that is literal. The error in the data was that because we must cross the Solent by ferry, the island is more than three hours away from either Bristol or London.

In May, that was pointed out to Mr Jeremy Glyde, the programme director of the Safe and Sustainable review. A statement issued on 3 June said that the team

“based retrieval times between the island and the mainland on travel by air. This was an oversight”

because the policy is

“to retrieve children from the Isle of Wight by road and ferry”.

That is very odd, because the consultation document explicitly states:

“Air travel has not been considered because it cannot always be relied upon”.

The statement goes on to say that

“an ambulance must reach the referring hospital within 3 hours, or within 4 hours in ‘remote areas’”.

The conclusion was that

“it is sensible to measure retrieval times to the Isle of Wight against the threshold for ‘remote areas’.”

On remote areas, the consultation document states:

“Removing surgery from some centres could have a disproportionate impact on children in some remote areas because ambulances would not be able to reach the child in three hours or less”—

meaning three hours or less from Southampton in my case.

On 3 June, Mr Glyde did not say why the Isle of Wight suddenly became a “remote area” when previously it was not. I am sure it did not move without me or any of the other 130,000 residents noticing. I asked Mr Glyde to point me to the guidelines that determine when an area is designated as “remote”. He told me that it was a “subjective interpretation” and that the review board recognised that the island,

“by its very nature, is remote from the mainland”.

Of course, that is accurate, but the board should have noticed earlier. After starting the consultation and working on it for years, it suddenly struck the board that there are

“unique factors around retrieval times by ferry”.

My Glyde was very helpful. He explained:

“We have been able to generate potential scenarios that could enable the ambulance to meet the standards”.

They did so not by using the “three hours” standard set out in the consultation, but by deciding that the “four hours” will apply to the newly remote Isle of Wight. It may be possible to generate scenarios in which an ambulance from Bristol or London can get to the island in four hours. I can generate some scenarios in which I become Prime Minister. Neither possibility can be entirely ruled out, but they do not reflect what is likely to happen in real life—[Hon. Members: “No!”]

Putting aside my political future, let us examine some realities. The AA route planner shows that it takes two hours to get to the other side of the Isle of Wight, and an hour at least—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order.