Congenital Cardiac Services for Children

George Hollingbery Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2011 Commons Chamber

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

I should like briefly to place on the record my grateful thanks to the 18 highly qualified consultants from Portsmouth who recently wrote to me to express their support for the Southampton unit. As time is short, rather than repeating much of what has been already said, I should like to concentrate solely on one element of the review: retrieval times and their effect on the volume gateway.

The number of operations that a centre undertakes is clearly important to generate wide experience across a team and maximise the accumulated wisdom in any unit and, crucially, its support services. That seems entirely logical and sensible, and it is, of course, at the very centre of the entire review, but the available volume is crucially affected by one absolutely critical variable: the distances of emergency admissions, or retrieval, as it is known.

The paediatric heart unit closest to my constituency is in Southampton—thus, of course, it has been the focus of my attention. I absolutely agree with the point made by many hon. Members that we should not let our local sympathies cloud our judgment on what is a national matter, and I hope I have not done so. It is worth pointing out to hon. Members that for many constituents in Meon Valley, my constituency, the reality is that the loss of the Southampton unit would not be a huge disadvantage. The change would result in their becoming clients of the Evelina children’s hospital at Guy’s and St Thomas’s—hardly a poor alternative for them—but we should notice that the insistence that a three-hour, road-based retrieval time for emergency admissions should act as part of the gateway excludes certain parts of the south-west and south Wales from Southampton’s potential catchment. Initially and puzzlingly, as we have also heard, the Isle of Wight was also excluded, but that seems to have been sorted out, for which we are all grateful.

Why is this important? Simply because Southampton has the second highest score for quality in the country at 513 points, with the Evelina at the top of the list with 535 points. Although I genuinely do not believe that it is the place of elected politicians to wade in every time that the NHS wants to reconfigure local services, I am concerned that the review is likely to result in the loss of one of the very best heart units in the country.

We have been told that quality was presumed to be the overall driver of the review and that quality trumped geographical proximity and convenience. So the decision to include the Southampton unit, which is rated second in the country for quality, in only one option must be regarded as running counter to the core principles of the decision-making process. I fear that the panel may choose to lose one of the highest-quality options available in favour of a lower-quality alternative, for reasons that do not necessarily stand up when looked at closely.

I believe that those who are tasked with making the decision need to satisfy themselves that the overall three-hour road retrieval criterion is truly as crucial as it seems. Can it really be right that, in a review driven at its core by quality, the population-level risk of closing the second highest-rated paediatric cardiac surgical unit in the country is truly outweighed by a possibly longer-than-three-hour retrieval for a small number of potential patients? Only the joint committee of primary care trusts can make that judgment, and I leave it to do so. I simply ask that it considers that key variable and wish it the very best in making a decision that, although entirely necessary, is bound to upset many people.