A and E and Ambulance Services Debate
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Andy Slaughter
Main Page: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)Department Debates - View all Andy Slaughter's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
A and E and Ambulance Services
Andy Slaughter Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Mr Hunt
I commend my hon. Friend for championing this cause. He is absolutely right that we need first aid. I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy)—I am not sure he is here—is a first responder, and I want to commend him for the work he does in that respect, because it makes a big difference in emergency situations if we can people to patients more quickly.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
The CQC report into Imperial, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) referred, found poor standards of cleanliness, too few nurses and thousands of patients awaiting surgery. It is the third CQC report in west London in four months, and it has found five major hospitals as requiring improvement and three A and E departments inadequate. The only one that is not inadequate—Charing Cross, which is good—is the one the Secretary of State wants to close. Waiting times are down to some of the worst in the country, yet they used to be among the best. We in west London do not recognise what he is saying. After two years of refusing, will he now meet me and other west London MPs to talk about the crisis in west London health care?
Mr Hunt
On the contrary, it is the hon. Gentleman’s constituents who do not recognise what he says or all the scaremongering leaflets about what is happening to NHS services in north-west London. We have plans to open two brand-new hospitals; we have weekend opening of GP surgeries; and we have big improvements happening in A and E departments. Let me gently say to him that, along with his Front-Bench team, he voted not to have a chief inspector of hospitals who could provide independent information about the quality of services. Now that he is quoting that information, I hope he realises that that was a mistake.