Accident and Emergency Waiting Times

Eric Ollerenshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

I have only a brief amount of time, so I will not repeat what other Members have said about demographics. I would also have liked to have talked about the NHS funding formula and the fact that Lancaster and Fleetwood is a rural area and there is no accounting for geography or the numbers of old people.

I agree with the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) and others who said we need a non-political debate. I shall focus on the question of staffing in A and E. People talk about crisis and chaos, but the majority of my electorate get a very good service from highly qualified professionals, who are working extremely hard. There is a staffing issue, however: we need to ensure there are enough properly qualified emergency specialist consultants working in A and Es both now and in the future and that they are not stretched to breaking point.

All this information comes from the doctors working in my A and E at the Royal Lancaster. This issue was also flagged up in a College of Emergency Medicine report, “The drive for quality”. The problem, which has been building over many years, is that ever fewer doctors want to move into the A and E specialty. That is largely because of the pressures of the work and the long and unsociable hours, including high-pressure weekend shifts that do not arise in other specialties. In turn, that leads to even more pressure on the few qualified consultants that remain, who have to work longer shifts and take on ever more responsibilities, and many of whom therefore eventually choose to go into other specialties as well. As a result, there is always a shortage of specialists.

To see how bad the problem was, I submitted a series of freedom of information requests last year, asking hospitals how many consultant emergency physician vacancies they had and how many people had applied for posts when they were last advertised. There seemed to be some regional variations—and my area, the north-west, seemed to be having particular difficulties—but there were some worrying general trends. Without naming individual hospitals, here are some examples: one hospital advertised for a senior clinical fellow on three separate occasions over the course of nine months, but there were no suitable applicants; another hospital advertised for three consultant emergency physicians, but no one applied; elsewhere, seven consultant vacancies were reported in one hospital, representing some 33% of its planned consultant staffing rate.

Even when there are applicants, competition is fierce. One hospital advertised for six vacancies and received four applications, but three of them withdrew prior to interview, presumably because they had been poached by employers elsewhere. Worryingly, sometimes the quality of applicants is not up to standard, as in the case of the hospital which advertised for five consultant emergency physician vacancies, only to conclude that none of the applicants was appropriately qualified.

I again stress that, according to the College of Emergency Medicine, this issue has been worsening over many years. We need to work constructively to ensure that emergency physician status is better recognised and rewarded within the NHS, so it can recruit and retain the required quality staff. This might not all be about money, by the way, but we definitely need to do more to tackle the issue and to give due credit and due status to the physicians who maintain the existing A and E service—which, as I have said, for the majority of my constituents is a good service.