NHS: South London Healthcare Trust

Baroness Donaghy Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, who I know well appreciates the scale of the problem with which the administrator was grappling. This trust was losing more than £1 million a week. That is not a sustainable position in the current NHS, or even when times were rosier as regards the financial settlement. It is important for me not to say anything that will pre-empt my right honourable friend’s conclusion, but I am aware, from the press release issued today by the trust special administrator, that, as the noble Lord rightly says, the wider health economy has been taken into consideration, including the role of Guy’s and King’s College Hospital, in a number of areas, including, in particular, in emergency care and in obstetrician-led maternity care. I would commend to the noble Lord a summary of the recommendations, which is on the department’s website today. I hope he will find that helpful in giving him a sense of the breadth of the administrator’s purview.

[Baroness Donaghy]

Is the Minister aware of the extreme anxiety among the population in Lewisham about the possible future closure of the A&E department in Lewisham? The population of 250,000 is estimated to rise to 300,000 in a very few years’ time as a result of a huge increase in the birth rate. There are very deep social needs and there is no doubt whatever that there is unanimity among the professionals and the population about the importance of maintaining that hospital. Is the Minister also concerned that one report that was produced, which was supposedly a clinical report, in fact turned out to be written by the communications department? Is he satisfied that the process has been a fair one and that there has not been a prejudgment in the consultation exercise?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, all questions of process must be for my right honourable friend to consider, including that one. I emphasise the Government’s approach to reconfiguration decisions. When the Government came into office, we took a very clear decision about four tests that needed to be applied to any sustainable reconfiguration within the NHS: the changes, whatever they were, had to command support from GP commissioners—that is to say, the clinical community; the public must be engaged in the process; the recommendations must be clinically sustainable and sound; and, as the statement mentioned, they must leave patients with a clear choice of good-quality providers. Those safeguards were not there before, but they are there now and my right honourable friend will be looking at those tests when he considers not just the matter of Lewisham but the totality of the administrator’s recommendations.