East of England Ambulance Service
Debate between Anna Soubry and Richard Bacon(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Anna Soubry
That is a good point, but it is not for me to say whether it has any merit that should be taken forward. But clearly it is an important point, which must now be considered.
May I quickly pay tribute to all the very helpful interventions from hon. Friends? My hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) talked about the buck passing in the NHS and the recycling. We also heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) and for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly). My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) made an excellent speech. My hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal also made an excellent and important speech. There were interventions from my hon. Friends the Members for Clacton (Mr Carswell) and for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst). There were speeches by my hon. Friends the Members for Harlow, for North West Norfolk and for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon). They all made important and good points.
We know that overall in England in 2012-13 the number of emergency calls to ambulance services was 9.08 million—a 6.9% increase. That is an important figure, I would suggest. We know that overall, in England, the performance figures are stable. That does not really assist in this debate, of course, because we also know that the East of England ambulance trust and, I have to say, my own, the East Midlands ambulance trust, have serious failings and the performance figures are simply not good enough.
The best that I can say of the performance of the East of England ambulance trust is that it has not been good. It is clearly recognised as the lowest-performing ambulance trust in England. As with the national picture, its overall poor performance figures hide huge discrepancies between the services and response times in the urban and rural areas that it covers. There are too many stories—we have heard many today—of patients in distress having to wait hours for ambulances, or solo paramedics being sent when an ambulance is needed. Solo paramedics cannot transport patients and might not, for instance, be able to lift or move a patient unaided. It is simply not good enough.
It is clear to me that some hon. Members and many patients might be forgiven for thinking that the trust seems to have forgotten that it is there to serve all patients and not only tick the performance boxes as far as it can. Concentrating resources in towns and effectively abandoning people in the countryside is simply unacceptable.
Anna Soubry
May I make some progress? Then I will take an intervention. The latest figures, as we have heard, show that the East of England ambulance trust failed to deliver two of the three response time standards. The exception was the performance against Category A Red 1—immediately life threatening—calls, where the 75% standard was achieved, with 75.8% of calls responded to within eight minutes.
Mr Bacon
The phenomenon of people forgetting what they are there for, which my hon. Friend alluded to, is of course what would happen in a mates culture. I have had the feeling for a long time that there has been the growth of what we might call a self-serving nomenclatura that looks after its own interests first. Then I heard my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie) on the radio the other day referring to a mafia within the top of the NHS, looking out for their own interests. What I want to know is, as this is a recognised phenomenon—I do not think we are going mad—what is the Department going to do about it?
Anna Soubry
In short, what I will say is that the Secretary of State has made it clear that it is a culture that he will not accept, and that no member of his ministerial team will accept. He is now becoming undoubtedly the champion of the patient. We are seeing that. We saw it last week with the CQC and then of course we saw the change: the names of people who had been put forward in the report were made public and people are now being held to account. We are beginning to see at least a tackling of this culture; we now need to see some results.