NHS Reorganisation

Helen Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

The treatment centres, which the hon. Gentleman mentions, helped contribute to bringing waiting times down to 18 weeks and helped to say to the British public, “Whatever treatment you need in hospital, you will not have to wait more than 18 weeks for it.” That was a consistent universal promise that we were able to make to patients as a guarantee for the future. That has now been ripped up, and we can see the result as waiting times and waiting lists lengthen. As I said at the start of my speech, my fear is that during this period of Tory leadership, we will see the NHS going backwards.

As for the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George), I understand his problem. He is a Liberal Democrat and I have to say that this health policy bears very little of the Liberal Democrat imprint. The one part of the Liberal health manifesto that they managed to get into the coalition agreement was this:

“We will ensure there is a stronger voice for patients locally through… elected individuals on the boards of their local primary care trust”.

Within two months, of course, that was not even worth the coalition agreement paper it was written on.

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that there is something else that the Government are not telling us—namely, the huge cost of getting rid of primary care trusts and strategic health authorities in respect of redundancy and getting out of broken contracts? Does he, like me, speculate that many of the people affected will end up working for GP consortiums or private health care firms—a huge cost to the public purse that delivers not one iota of front-line care?

[John Healey]

Quite so. Estimates of the cost of the reorganisation are up to £3 billion, but we have not had any cost announcements from this Government, who will not tell us how much is going to be spent on reorganisation rather than on patient care. At a time when finances are tight, this is precisely the wrong prescription for the NHS over the next few years.

It is no wonder that GPs have grave doubts—they trained as family doctors, not as accountants or procurement managers, and they are committed to treating patients, not doing deals over contracts. However, they will be forced to commission services, whether they like it or not; they will make rationing decisions, not just referral decisions for their patients; and they will have to take on the deficits or inbuilt funding shortfalls in their PCT areas. GPs spend an average of eight or nine minutes with each patient. If they plan, negotiate, manage and monitor commissioning contracts in future, they will have no time left to see patients. If they continue to be family doctors, commissioning will be done for them, not by them; it will be done in their name by many of the same PCT managers who presently do the job or by commercial companies that have already started hard-selling their services to GPs. The other day I picked up “The Essential Guide to GP Commissioning” helpfully published by United Health—one of the biggest US-based health care companies in the world.