Queen Mary’s Hospital: Urgent Care Services

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

I am grateful that Mr Speaker has granted this debate, and to the Minister for Health, the hon. Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), for taking time out of his schedule to respond to it. This issue is of huge concern to my constituents, as I am sure he can understand. More than 300 of them have signed my petition just this past week, and many have been in touch with me to explain how important the issue of urgent care services at Queen Mary’s Hospital is to them.

I have called for this debate and am standing here today because I really value our local hospitals and all the work that the fantastic staff have done during this pandemic to care for us, to endlessly adapt systems and services and to save lives. I take this opportunity to thank the NHS managers, doctors, nurses, cleaners and support staff for all that they do. It is because I, and local residents, value our local hospital so much that I ask the Minister to support the reopening of the urgent treatment centre and the pharmacy for out-patients before the winter and the increasing demand begins. It is really important that it is a walk-in treatment centre that does not require bookings.

Allow me to provide some context for the Minister. In August 1997, Queen Mary’s Hospital, which is in Roehampton, ended its A&E service, and has since had a minor injuries unit, which the trust gave a gold-standard accreditation in November last year. So there is no A&E service in my constituency. The minor injuries unit was upgraded to an urgent treatment centre, with a GP added to the excellent nurse practitioner staff, earlier this year. In a normal year, the centre serves 16,000 to 18,000 people, so it is a vital service in our community.

During the peak of the pandemic, the decision was taken to temporarily close the service because of a lack of space for social distancing and to be able to adhere to Government guidelines, and also to move the staff to other areas that needed them more. The pharmacy for out-patients has only recently been closed, and at very short notice. Of course I understand, as do local residents, that changes had to made and that health services had to adapt. I fully appreciate that our NHS managers had to make some extremely difficult decisions on service provision as they faced the prospect of being overwhelmed, which they are now facing again, with the second wave. The continued closure makes us in Roehampton feel overlooked, and it is putting additional pressures on NHS services at Teddington, the walk-in centre at Kingston, St George’s Hospital A&E and local GP surgeries. I am concerned that this will cause untold long-term damage to the health and wellbeing of our community. 

I have been asked, “What about the person with the dislocated shoulder, the chest pain, the allergic reaction?” They all need to be assessed and stabilised urgently, but at the moment they are being turned away. I have met the chief executive of the hospital trust and raised these issues. I asked her to assure me that the centre would be reopened as soon as it was safe to do so, but she has not confirmed when it will reopen, if at all. That is very worrying. I hope to hear from the Minister this evening that he will support the trust in making plans to reopen the walk-in urgent treatment centre. 

I would like briefly to explain the impacts that the closure is having on local people. Anyone who goes to where the minor injuries unit used to be is asked to travel far away to the Teddington walk-in centre, to Kingston A&E or to St George’s A&E in Tooting. Those bus journeys can take an hour, which can result in painful journeys or in many people not making the journey, not being seen and not being treated. I am sure the Minister will agree that an hour on public transport is an unacceptably long journey time when there is a really good hospital right there in Roehampton, but it is just not open for walk-in urgent care. One of my constituents wrote to me this week to say:

“I took my elderly father, who is nearly 90 years old, to Queen Mary’s just over a month ago, because he had cut his fingers quite badly and they were bleeding. The kind staff there had helped us when my father had a similar problem last year and they knew how to bandage his fingers because he has very thin skin…Because the Centre was closed, we had to go all the way to Kingston Hospital which was quite stressful. While his treatment there was good, it would have been far easier if we could have gone somewhere more local to him as my father isn’t used to travelling that far.”

Also, some patients are unable to travel or should not travel. An example is patients with diabetic foot ulcers, who should keep their activity to a minimum to allow ulcers to heal. At the same time, if they have an infection, it needs treating immediately as it could deteriorate rapidly leading to the need for amputation. That is one group of patients who are not getting the care they need because the urgent treatment centre and the pharmacy are not open. There is an obvious health risk to people needing to travel further if they are seriously ill.

There is also an increased risk of covid infection through asking people to travel greater distances by public transport during the pandemic, especially when they are unwell or chronically ill. They could have an underlying condition, which might be the reason they are going to the urgent care centre in the first place. That would make them more susceptible to the effects of covid-19. Closing the pharmacy is having the effect of delaying patients receiving treatment, as they are now being referred to their GP by the clinics. If they cannot immediately get an appointment with their GP, this can lead to delays of up to 48 hours before starting their treatment. That is another impact.

There is also a knock-on effect on services in other places. The fact that 16,000 to 18,000 people a year used to be treated at Queen Mary’s is putting pressure on St George’s and Kingston, along with the increasing demand at the moment. GP surgery appointments are already at a premium, and this demand will only worsen as the difficult winter months approach. Even before the pandemic, it was reported that over 11 million patients had to wait more than 21 days for a GP appointment. In my constituency, there are 14 main surgeries and three branch practices. My team has called round all the local GP services. Several are still only doing appointments over Zoom, and in one local medical centre, a member of staff begged for the urgent care centre to reopen due to the pressure its closure is causing for GP surgeries.

Increased demand for overstretched GP surgeries with finite resources ultimately means fewer local people’s conditions or illnesses receiving treatment, and even more concerningly, serious and urgent illnesses such as cancer being missed and going undiagnosed. It is cancer diagnosis that I am particularly concerned about. As the Minister knows, lots of cancers are diagnosed when people present at hospital with a symptom. With the doors of the urgent treatment centre still closed, many cancers that might otherwise have been spotted will have been missed.

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Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Maria Caulfield.)

[Fleur Anderson]

Many cancers will be missed if people cannot go to the urgent care centre and are redirected to other facilities, because there is a real concern that they are not making that journey.

According to Breast Cancer Now, the importance of GP referrals and of the NHS breast screening programme to breast cancer survival cannot be underestimated. However, the number of people referred to see a specialist with suspected cancer declined dramatically during the peak of the coronavirus outbreak. In England, between March and July this year, there were 95,000 fewer referrals by a GP for tests.

Prostate cancer is also of real concern. This cancer claims the life of one man every 45 minutes in the UK. Early diagnosis, as I know from my own family, really does save lives. The impact of covid-19 has meant that around 3,500 men in the UK risk being diagnosed with last-stage, incurable prostate cancer. With GP appointments often hard to get, urgent care centres such as the one at Queen Mary’s Hospital are very important in spotting signs of cancer early on. The prolonged closures of urgent care centres are accelerating the crisis in cancer care. Cancer and other serious diseases will not wait for the covid-19 crisis to abate—they will not wait until the winter is over—before taking lives again. We cannot lose sight of this. We cannot risk the lives of local people.

In summary, the urgent treatment centre and pharmacy at Queen Mary’s Hospital is a very valued and valuable local health service with fantastic staff. I understand that it had to close and that difficult decisions had to be made, but for too long, people in Roehampton, Putney and Southfields needing urgent care have been sent away. That is leading to some people going untreated and others suffering on long journeys, and it is adding to the pressure on A&E services at Kingston Hospital and St George’s Hospital in Tooting. It is time to stop sending people with dislocated shoulders, deep cuts, chest pains or severe allergic reactions to places an hour away when we have a great hospital with great urgent care nurses in our own community. We need the out-patient pharmacy to provide medications for treatment as soon as they are needed. There is more demand than ever for a walk-in service at the urgent treatment centre, which used to treat 16,000 to 18,000 people a year. My ask of the Minister is simple: will he do everything in his power to reopen the urgent treatment centre with walk-in capacity and the out-patient pharmacy at Queen Mary’s Hospital before the winter begins?