Accident and Emergency Waiting Times

Ian Swales Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

That is part of the problem with Labour’s approach to the NHS—a top-down approach of closing or downgrading A and E units and making the NHS sort out the problems. We are not doing that.

It is time that Labour took responsibility for the disastrous changes to the GP contract, which contributed to making it so much harder to get a GP appointment and piled further pressure on A and E departments—[Interruption.] No, they need to listen; this is important. The changes in 2004 handed responsibility for providing out-of-hours services to administrators in primary care trusts, at a stroke removing the 24/7 responsibility for patients that until then had always been a core part of being a family doctor. As we heard earlier today, even a former Labour Health Minister regretted those changes, saying before the last election:

“In many ways, GPs got the best deal they ever had from that 2004 contract and since then we have, in a sense, been recovering.”

It is important that Labour Members hear the list of independent voices all saying that we need fundamental change in primary care if we are to deal with pressures on A and E: the College of Emergency Medicine, the Royal College of Physicians, the NHS Alliance, the Family Doctor Association, the head of the Royal College of General Practitioners, who—surprisingly—said something in support of the Government in The Guardian this morning, the Foundation Trust Network and so on. All those voices were ignored by Labour as it put its head in the sand about that disastrous change to the GP contract.

[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

Does the Secretary of State share my horror that the out-of-hours contracts awarded by the previous Government to companies such as Serco give them a financial incentive to call an ambulance rather than deal with cases through GPs or in the community?

[Mr Hunt]

The system is dysfunctional, and at the heart of the problem is Labour’s creation of a system in which GPs lost round-the-clock responsibility for the patients on their list. That is fundamentally wrong and we need to deal with it.