National Health Service

Debate between Angela Smith and Sharon Hodgson

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

I feel privileged to take part in this important debate, which has focused on how the state of the NHS is playing out in Members’ local areas. The contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) encouraged me to reflect on just how recently the NHS was formed. It was launched by Nye Bevan on 5 July 1948, which means that anybody alive today who is in their late 60s or older would have been born before the NHS was created.

My parents, for instance, were war babies, born well before the NHS was launched. That reflection serves as a reminder not just of how recent the NHS is, but of how easy it might be to let the NHS slip away from our grasp. It is not something that we can take for granted. It is the responsibility of all of us in this place who truly believe in the NHS not only to fight for its survival—that is not good enough—but to see it strengthened and always fit for the challenges of our time. Currently, those challenges are many.

In an intervention earlier, I referred to the sickness and absence levels beginning to emerge across the country, including in Barnsley, in my constituency, and in Sheffield, and how much that is costing the NHS, but also how much it reflects the problems that the NHS faces.

I want to focus briefly on ambulance services, because they have not featured very much in today’s debate yet they are a pressing issue in my constituency. I represent an outlying area of South Yorkshire, which extends well into the national park. It is predominantly rural and is suffering from serious problems. I will use two cases to demonstrate the problems that we are facing.

Mr Offord collapsed on 16 April 2013, at approximately 11 pm. A 999 call was made, but a double-staffed ambulance did not get to Mr Offord until 11.25, by which time he was in respiratory arrest. On being transferred to the floor from the sofa, he was determined to be in cardiac arrest. He died the following day. The coroner ruled that there was a serious lost opportunity in the failure to consider alternative sources of support for a lone paramedic—the first response to the call—and that Mr Offord would probably have survived if he had received medical attention earlier. Mr Offord’s family, obviously very distressed, have settled that case out of court, but they want a wider justice for their son and brother. They want to see ambulance services and response times improved.

Mr Bailey, who I mentioned in my parliamentary question earlier today, collapsed in a shop. As I said, it took an hour and four minutes—and it was a Red 2 priority call—for an ambulance to get to him, despite the fact that the symptoms described in the emergency call were apparently those of a stroke; indeed, he had suffered a major stroke. This detail is horrific, but I must place it on the record: he had to have part of his skull removed because of the severity of the stroke. In summary, the dispatcher made two errors, which contributed to the delay in an ambulance attending to Mr Bailey, and—these are the words of the Yorkshire ambulance trust itself—“no checks” were

“made for an available ambulance from 13:31 until 14:03; and no allocation”

was made

“of one of the nearer ambulances identified at 14:11.”

All the ambulance trust has to say is:

“Please pass on my sincere apologies to both Mr and Mrs Bailey for the errors and the delay caused.”

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

I am so pleased that my hon. Friend has raised this important issue. I have had so many people write to me about the state of the ambulance service. One gentleman, over a year ago, had to wait for two hours. I have also been contacted by a whistleblower from the call centre who is discouraged from sending ambulances—they have to dig and try and find any way. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is desperate and needs to be sorted out?

[Angela Smith]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and I am really sorry to hear of the cases she raises. The situation really does need to be sorted out, because the Yorkshire ambulance trust goes on to say that

“the service was experiencing a high level of demand in the South Yorkshire area around the time of Mr Bailey’s incident. Overall, demand was 12% above predicted levels and the level of ‘Red’ call demand was 55% above predicted levels…Rising demand on all health care resources continues which requires changes to deliver improvements in urgent and emergency care.”

I shall say no more about Mr Bailey’s case because it will be referred elsewhere and it may well go to law—I have simply set out the facts of the case as they have been put to me—but the point is this: why are we experiencing these problems with response times in the ambulance service? Why are we hearing, week after week in Prime Minister’s questions and on the Floor of the House in other debates, that the ambulance service is letting people down—even in the most serious cases, when people are going into cardiac arrest or having a major stroke?

We need to establish the reasons, and I suggest that there are three obvious ones. There may be more—there may be problems with the management of ambulance services, and in many cases there clearly is a problem in the case of YAS—but I would suggest that there are three obvious problems. One problem is the increasing difficulty that people have in getting access to GPs’ surgeries. The evidence was laid before the people present for this debate earlier, by the shadow Secretary of State, so I will not go through it again.

Secondly, there has been the closure of NHS Direct and the establishment of NHS 111. There is no way that NHS 111 can be compared with NHS Direct; it is like comparing apples and pears. I have used NHS Direct in the past. It was a superb service that enabled me to decide which was the appropriate place to go to for my treatment and to get the right treatment at the right time. I can assure hon. Members that the one place I did not end up, having used NHS Direct, was A and E—that would have been the last place I had to go to.

Thirdly, social care cuts represent one of the most fundamental problems of our time. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) said, £1 in every £10 has already been cut from social care budgets. It is obvious, even to the most disinterested observers of the debate on health, that cutting social care budgets at local authority level will ultimately impact on the health service. I was in local government for 10 years, and I saw for myself the importance of the local authority and the local NHS working together to enable elderly people to stay in their own homes and to keep them out of the health system—the acute health system, in particular—as much as possible.

The shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), outlined what needs to be done in the very long term, strategically, to get the NHS in the right shape. He also outlined the more immediate actions that a Labour Government would have to take if they gained power in May: providing more clinically trained staff to handle NHS 111 calls; restoring the GP guarantee of an appointment within 48 hours; and ensuring that councils, the NHS and the local voluntary sector work together to identify older people at the highest risk of hospital admission and link them up with the right support. I cannot wait for 8 May to see that strategy for the short term being put in place.

Ambulance services are crucial to the trust that people have, and need to have, in their local health services. One can broadly measure the trust that people have in their local health service by how much they can rely on their ambulances. Everybody likes to think that if they need an ambulance they will get one, and get it quickly. I was disappointed this afternoon that the Prime Minister used my question to indulge in petty political point-scoring. These issues are too serious for that. He did not even express sympathy for the family affected and instead made a cheap point about NHS staff. That was disgraceful. It is not good enough, and it is not good enough—