Cherilyn Mackrory
Main Page: Cherilyn Mackrory (Conservative - Truro and Falmouth)Department Debates - View all Cherilyn Mackrory's debates with the Home Office
(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) for bringing forward this important and timely debate. Health services in Cornwall are under strain, as they are in other places. I put on record my thanks to all the doctors and health and social care practitioners in Cornwall for their outstanding work, not only throughout the pandemic but throughout what is proving to be a difficult winter following a difficult summer. I will touch on that later.
In Cornwall, we actually have a slighter greater number of GPs than we had in 2018, but more are choosing to work part time, owing to the intensity of the workload. Our register of GP trainees has also slightly increased in head count since 2018, but the whole-time equivalent has slightly decreased over the last four years despite the head count going up.
Further good news is that the Cornwall training hub has had success in attracting GPs into Cornwall through the introduction to Cornwall scheme and flexible working international GP initiatives, which is encouraging those who train here to remain in Cornwall. However, our geography means we cannot share staff with other areas or trusts, so such schemes are vital to our staffing levels.
The University of Exeter’s Medical School Truro campus is a centre of excellence for the delivery of medical education and training at the Royal Cornwall Hospital. The centre does an excellent job of training up the next generation of doctors; I would like to see more junior doctors training at the university considering a move to Cornwall to start their careers. Who would not want to move to Cornwall? Those who do will find themselves surrounded by a community of extremely welcoming and friendly people, both students and staff, as well as the beautiful outdoors, with the ocean on their doorstep. Who would not want that?
As chair of the APPGs on baby loss and on women’s health, I am grateful to the Government for commissioning NHS England’s long-term workforce plan. My co-chair of the baby loss APPG is now the Chancellor; this is an issue that he has campaigned on for a really long time, so I am encouraged that we will get somewhere now. The Government are growing the health and social care workforce, with more than 4,000 more doctors compared with last year, and it is so important to Cornwall that those doctors are spread throughout the country.
I go back to my point about the hard summer. Because Cornwall is so beautiful, we get 2 million visitors a year. Unlike in other parts of the country, our health service gets no respite in the summer before a difficult winter. Staff have been working at top speed since the beginning of the pandemic without any respite. We need to talk to the Government about fairer funding to try to mitigate some of the effects so that staff can take holidays and have some respite, so that there are enough staff to pick up the slack, and so that our health service can move forward in caring for our ageing population. As I already mentioned, our geography means that we cannot share staff.
The Government must do all it can to tackle Cornwall’s housing crisis. GP surgeries and other employers across the entire health service in Cornwall often say that they offer jobs but that people cannot take the work because they cannot find housing. That applies for every kind of healthcare worker, from healthcare assistants to consultants; it certainly applies to our GPs and hospital doctors. As I have called for in Parliament before, we must ensure that key workers in both the public and private sectors can afford to buy and rent affordably in the area. I am pleased to say that that will be a priority for developments in Langarth and in Pydar Street in Truro.
I join my colleagues in calling for additional training places for doctors. I hope that the Government recognise that those wishing to train in Cornwall are a key part of the solution. I look forward to continuing to work with the Government on all aspects of improving the health service, with a particular tilt towards rural and coastal areas and, of course, I invite the Minister to Cornwall to talk to our healthcare providers to see their particular challenges.