Defending Public Services
Debate between Diana Johnson and Heidi Alexander(8 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Heidi Alexander
My hon. Friend makes a good point, and motivated staff are essential to providing high-quality care.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
Under the last Labour Government, new medical schools were set up—including Hull York medical school—to train the additional doctors that we knew the NHS needed. The Queen’s Speech is a missed opportunity because there is no announcement about increasing capacity in those new medical schools that Labour brought in.
Heidi Alexander
My hon. Friend is, as always, entirely right.
The Government have run out of answers and they have run out of people to blame. Whichever way we look at it—funding, quality of care or staffing—theirs is a record of failure. That will be the Health Secretary’s legacy. He rightly said “Never again” to Mid Staffs, but his time in office has been marked by tragedy and failure at Southern Health. He talks about patient safety, but his actions have made the NHS less safe.
The Government have failed patients and staff. They have proved the old saying true: we simply cannot trust the Tories with the NHS.
NHS Bursaries
Debate between Diana Johnson and Heidi Alexander(8 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Heidi Alexander
The Labour party has always made it clear that it would have given the NHS every penny it needs.
Given the approach to healthcare students I have outlined, most people would think the Government had taken leave of their senses. They would be right.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
My constituents in Hull are baffled by the Government’s approach. At a time when our local hospitals have to recruit nurses from Spain and other European countries, stopping bursaries that enable more people to get training seems absolutely ridiculous.
Heidi Alexander
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, the bursary acts as an incentive to get those students into training and into the NHS.
A few weeks ago, the Government launched their consultation on the technical detail of the changes—not the principle, just the detail. In his foreword, the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Ipswich, claimed that the proposals were
“good for students, good for patients and good for the NHS.”
The opposite is the case.
Before I set out why the plans are so bad, it is important to remind ourselves of why our country has a nursing shortage in the first place. Shortly after the 2010 election, the coalition Government cut the number of nurse training commissions in an attempt to make short-term savings. The cuts saw nurse training places reduced from more than 20,000 a year to just 17,000, the lowest level since the 1990s. As a result, we trained 8,000 fewer nurses in the previous Parliament than we would have done had we maintained commissions at 2010 levels. At the time, experts such as the Royal College of Nursing warned that the cuts would cause
“serious issues in undersupply for years to come.”
It was right, but it was ignored by Ministers who were too focused on the short term and no doubt too distracted by their plans to launch a massive reorganisation of the NHS.
Our health service is now suffering the consequences of those decisions. New analysis by the House of Commons Library released today shows that the number of nurses per head of population fell from 6,786 per million people in 2009 to 6,645 per million people in 2015. A Unison survey published just last week found that more than two-thirds of respondents felt that staffing levels had got worse in the past year, with a further 63% saying they felt there were inadequate numbers of staff on the wards to ensure safe, dignified and compassionate care. Because of these shortages, hospitals are forced to recruit from overseas or spend vast amounts on expensive agency staff.