Community Hospitals

Debate between David Simpson and Charlie Elphicke

Wednesday 3rd September 2014 Westminster Hall

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), to the debate and congratulate him on his elevation in the reshuffle before the summer recess. It is a pleasure to speak in such a well attended debate, with so many parliamentary colleagues coming to share my concerns about the future of our community hospitals.

The purpose of this debate is to make the case for the Government’s putting the community back into community hospitals and for recognising that such hospitals should have a central role in coping with the issue of people living longer. Community hospitals are important providers of recovery beds that speed rehabilitation and recovery, which can also help older people in particular to continue to live independently.

I was inspired to seek this debate because people in my community care deeply about the local community hospitals in Dover and Deal. Years of centralisation have taken their toll. My constituents want more locally-based health services provided by their local hospitals.

Dover was deeply concerned to see services axed at its Buckland hospital; wards were closed one by one and a much-loved hospital was decimated over a decade. When I was elected in 2010, plans for a new hospital had been going nowhere for getting on for a decade and the new hospital project was set to be axed altogether. Meanwhile, in Deal, it was agreed in 2006 that out-patient services should be axed and residents were fearful that the hospital would be closed altogether. However, after much hard campaigning, the long-stalled new Dover hospital is being built. It will open in February or March next year and will have out-patient facilities, day surgery, diagnostics and a revamped urgent care centre. The number of journeys that will need to be taken to the big, far away hospitals will fall dramatically. It will make a massive difference.

In Deal, we campaigned hard to safeguard the future of the hospital. A massive survey and a packed public meeting ensured that NHS chiefs pledged not to close the hospital and they will now seek to expand its services. We now hope that out-patient services can be maintained for people who find it hard to travel: the elderly, the partially sighted and people with broken bones.

However, we have not achieved everything that we want. People in Dover want recovery beds to be located at the new hospital. Residents of Deal would like greater community and local general practitioner involvement in the hospital and its services. Both communities would like more locally-based services, to minimise the number of journeys to the large, far away acute hospitals for simple procedures and treatments. These concerns led me to move a ten-minute rule Bill earlier this year and I was delighted that so many parliamentary colleagues supported that.

The issue is not just for Dover and Deal; I have set out the local situation to provide context for the concerns of so many parliamentary colleagues. There are some 400 local and community hospitals throughout the land and there are similar stories to be told about many of them—stories of people battling to defend their hospitals and hospital services against the NHS leviathan and the forces of centralisation.

There is a sense that the tide has begun to turn. After all, a new hospital is being built at Dover, health chiefs have pledged to secure the future for Deal hospital, and there has been a move towards a fairer share of health care for rural and semi-rural communities far from acute hospitals. We have come a long way. Today, I am making the case for going further and asking what more we can do to embrace community hospitals and bring them closer to the heart of the NHS and, in particular, support the role that they play in providing recovery beds and more locally-based services, particularly for an ageing population. We need to put the community back into community hospitals.

We should note an important moment in the history of the NHS, marked by the comments of Simon Stevens, the new chief executive of NHS England, who recently made the case for patients to be treated more often in their own communities, saying that the NHS is currently too focused on

“a steady push towards centralisation”

and that Britain should learn from countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States, which have strengthened community care around small hospitals to meet the needs of local communities.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining this debate. In Northern Ireland, of course, we do not have as many community hospitals as there are on the mainland. Ours tend to feed into a main hub and we have out-of-hours services more than community hospitals. However, Mr Stevens, whom the hon. Gentleman mentioned, also says that we should consider community hospitals developing as social enterprises. What is the hon. Gentleman’s view on that?

[Charlie Elphicke]

The hon. Gentleman anticipates the direction of my speech. I wholly support it; it is a great idea. Mr Stevens also said:

“A number of other countries have found it possible to run viable local hospitals serving smaller communities than sometimes we think are sustainable in the NHS”

and that

“Most of western Europe has hospitals which are able to serve their local communities, without everything having to be centralised”.

In a speech to the NHS Confederation annual conference in June 2014, he outlined his plans for reform of community health services, reiterating the problems of the ageing population and the increasing number of long-term conditions, such as obesity and dementia, as well as more expansive and expensive treatments and the need for more localised health services to tackle these problems.

Mr Stevens is right. Community hospitals have an important role to play and perform best in respect of intermediate, step-down and step-up recovery beds, particularly for people recovering from an operation who need round-the-clock care, and in respect of helping older people get better and continue to live independently, keeping them out of end-of-life or long-term nursing home care.