Seaton Community Hospital

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

I would like to welcome the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), to her place.

I rise to raise the pressing situation facing the community hospital at Seaton in the part of east Devon that I represent. I am very grateful for the opportunity to outline why plans to strip away a whole wing of the hospital pose a serious risk to the long-term viability of the hospital, and how small actions by the Government can unlock this space and provide huge benefits for the local communities.

Seaton Hospital is one of 12 community hospitals that provide vital services in my corner of Devon which were given over to NHS Property Services in 2016. Seaton Hospital provides a range of services and clinics that enable people to be cared for closer to home in their own community. I would like to take a moment to give hon. and right hon. Members an idea of the range of services that the hospital currently provides. They include a dedicated Chime audiology service, aneurysm screening, bladder and bowel treatments, and child and adolescent mental health services—we heard a lot about that in today’s health debate—as well as access to a dietician, ear, nose and throat specialists, general medicine, orthoptists, support for those with Parkinson’s, physiotherapy, podiatry, retinal screening, speech and language therapy, and stoma treatments. I could go on.

The hospital also acts as a hub for the growing number of so-called at-home care services. We appreciate that community hospitals have been increasingly moving over to services provided in the community at home. That includes provision for those who are frail and need regular care, or are reaching the end of their life. Indeed, the Seaton & District Hospital League of Friends supports the hospice at home professionals, who provide care to people and their families in those most difficult times of a person’s life or in a family’s life.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for securing this debate. When someone evaluates what a community hospital does, they find that it is about much more than finance and making sure that the books balance. It is about all the things the hon. Gentleman has referred to. The community hospital in my constituency is where my three children were born some 30-plus years ago. It is where I took my youngest son when he broke his arm. It is where I took my other boy when he put his hand through a glass window and had to go to hospital for surgery. That is what a community hospital is about, and that feeling is replicated by every one of my constituents. When the hon. Gentleman speaks about his local community hospital, I am quite sure that he has the same passion, belief and commitment to that hospital, because it is part of the community, and that is how it is measured, not by finance.

[Richard Foord]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. His anecdotes about what that hospital has done for his family and community are absolutely the same sort of thing as I hear from constituents every time I speak to them.

Seaton Hospital was built in 1988 to provide better local access to medical care and treatment for people across the Axe valley. It serves people not only in Seaton but in Colyton, Colyford, Beer, Axmouth and other villages dotted around the east Devon countryside. Originally, the plan was that people would not have to travel so far for their treatment. Given that the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital is perhaps 30 miles away—20 miles at least—people felt that acute provision was on their doorsteps, which is what they wanted.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Foord]

I very much thank my hon. Friend for her contribution. She is exactly right. I point to two specific conversations I have had with constituents recently. The first was with someone who lives in Seaton, who was close enough to the hospital that she could walk there. Her husband died in the hospital and she was able to go and see him in his final days. She welled up—more than that, tears rolled down her cheeks—as she told me about her husband, who she was able to see in his final days.

Now we have moved to a situation in which patients are cared for at home. Of course, that means that some of the staff previously based out of the community hospital are driving to people’s driveways and providing that care in their homes. That works for some individuals, but the other day I had a lady in my surgery who was almost shaking with nervousness because her husband, whom she loved dearly, had just been discharged from the acute hospital in Exeter and she was charged with looking after him but did not feel able to look after his needs, as he was overcoming his operation towards the end of his life. We are putting some of our constituents in a really difficult situation that they do not feel equipped for.

The reason for the beds being removed from the hospital in 2017 related to so-called workforce issues. There was a substantial consultation of local people in 2017 when beds were removed from local hospitals, but I fear that following that consultation, which showed the outrage and indignation of local people, the NHS does not want to get involved such a consultation exercise again, hence the desire for the ICB to get shot of the building as soon as possible.

The ICB was talking about getting shot of it by the end of this calendar year, although that has gone to Devon County Council’s health scrutiny committee, so it may be pushed into next year. What we need tonight is an intervention from the Minister in relation to NHS Property Services, which is charging a clinical rate for a space that has not been used for acute medicine—it has not had clinical beds in it—since 2017. Organisations are coming forward with a desire to use it not for clinical use but as a care hub to provide other services.

I want to make hon. Members aware of how those clinical beds got removed in the first place. In 2017, there was deep concern that the removal of the beds was an arbitrary decision made following a last-minute intervention by the then right hon. Member for East Devon, Hugo, now Lord Swire. In fact, it is revealed in a book by his wife, Sasha, that Seaton Hospital was to be kept open, with its beds maintained, but, because of that last-minute intervention by Hugo Swire, the bed closures moved to Seaton and the Sidmouth Hospital beds remained.

As a result of that decision, there was no additional funding to set up extra services at Seaton. Instead, the ICB began charging this exceedingly high rent for an empty space. What we really need to do is reduce that rental fee from its clinical rate to one that acknowledges that there are community alternatives. The palliative care nursing team can operate out of this space, and organisations such as Restore and hospice at home carers can work out of it, too. The friends of Seaton and District Hospital are coming up with a strong business plan, but they do need more time to develop it and a concessionary rate—not the clinical rate—to operate from it. If no solution is found, the ward is most likely to be either sold off or demolished. Again—I cannot stress this enough—we need to do this for the people who feel that they paid for the hospital.

There is a precedent for it, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) for letting me know that the hospital in Cornwall was saved from the jaws of NHS Property Services. However, there is a big difference between what I am proposing for Seaton and what happened at St Ives. St Ives hospital was paid for by a single philanthropist. As we have heard, Seaton Hospital was paid for with contributions—or subscriptions —from thousands of people.

[Jim Shannon]

The widow’s mite.

[Richard Foord]

Exactly.

Finally, when it comes to healthcare infrastructure in rural areas such as mine, it is so much harder to rebuild something once it has been removed than to maintain it. We saw in coastal and rural communities such as mine the damage that the closure of cottage hospitals caused, and the impact of removing beds from community hospitals. We must put a stop to that, before our rural healthcare centres are left empty skeletal shells of their former selves, where they were once hubs of love and care. I am looking forward to the Minister’s response and hope that she will agree to work constructively with me, as Seaton’s MP, to ensure a fair deal for local people and to protect our hospital for the people who bought and contributed to it.