Hospital Services (South Manchester)

Debate between Kate Green and Lord Brady of Altrincham

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Graham Brady (Altrincham and Sale West) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) on securing this debate. It is a pleasure to be working alongside him, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) and other concerned Members from Greater Manchester, who are deeply worried and troubled by the proposals being put forward in Healthier Together as a whole and for Wythenshawe hospital, the university hospital of south Manchester, in particular.

It gives none of us any pleasure to be here and to have to raise this debate, any more than it gives the consultants at Wythenshawe hospital any pleasure or satisfaction to have been pushed to the point where they felt that the only way to make their voices heard and ensure that their fears about patient safety in the longer term did not come to pass was to pursue the initial stages of judicial review. I could not agree more with the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East that that is not the way that any of us would wish to have this question resolved.

As the hon. Gentleman said, throughout the Healthier Together process, colleagues on both sides of the House have warned that the process was deeply flawed. The consultation undertaken over a three-year period is the worst instance of public consultation that I have encountered in my 18 years in this place. It moved immediately from discussion of warm platitudes about improved collaboration, and the better results that that can achieve, to a table of possible outcomes that was so complicated that no member of the public could hope to understand the implications. The whole episode raises some profoundly serious questions, both about the delivery of the best possible health services in Greater Manchester and about accountability in the delivery of public services and the ways we can ensure that the public view is properly heard and respected.

As the hon. Gentleman—my colleague—said, in Greater Manchester we are poised to embark on some very exciting changes, which, if got right, will make dramatic improvements in our delivery of health and social care and could provide not just a great improvement for our constituents but a model for many other parts of the country to follow. If instead we see this sort of flawed decision-making process proceed, the danger is that people will see devolving power and decision making to a more local level not as something that will empower them and give them a stronger voice but as something that will result in less accountability and is less likely to deliver for local communities. We need to ensure that the Government understand and the Department recognises that there would be a significant cost if this episode were allowed to damage wider public trust. All of us want more devolved decision making in Greater Manchester, but we want it done right, not in the deeply flawed way presaged by this process.

Not only was the consultation flawed—it appeared to be designed to obfuscate and confuse members of the public, rather than to be a genuine exercise in seeking public opinion—but the decision-making process at its conclusion was pursued in a way that is clearly unreasonable. I concur with the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East that, given the unreasonable nature of the process from beginning to end, there is every likelihood that, should judicial review be pursued to its conclusion, it will be successful. That is an important reason why we need people throughout the process—whether power now lies with the Department of Health or with the commissioning bodies—to get a grip on this problem and to try to bring it to a more satisfactory conclusion.

I do not want to go into enormous detail about the decision-making process—the hon. Gentleman has given a good survey of the technical questions that Healthier Together raises for UHSM—but we have seen clear support among the members of the public who responded to the consultation for Wythenshawe to be the fourth specialist hospital. Of course, the weight of responses cannot always be the factor that leads to a decision, but it is incumbent on those involved in any decision-making process to take public views seriously. If those views are to be discounted, that should be only on the most serious grounds and on the basis of clearly reasoned arguments.

I have two principal concerns about the grounds on which the weight of opinion was disregarded. First, there is the deeply spurious decision not to take account of the current standard of care delivered at Wythenshawe hospital. Any lay person and—I venture to suggest, having had many conversations with senior clinicians—any senior clinician would regard it as patently absurd to discount the hospital’s current clinical standards on the grounds that all the other hospitals are expected to reach the same standard at some point in the future so the standard is of no consequence. It is Orwellian to run policy and decision making in that way. I hope that the Minister will accept that that should give serious pause and serious cause for concern.

The second significant point, which the hon. Gentleman also raised, relates to the decision finally being grounded on the travel time for a relatively small population in High Peak—I am not saying this because my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) has had to leave the Chamber to go to a Committee. The failure properly to take account of the A6 relief road, which is now being built, and which will deliver flows of patients from High Peak to Wythenshawe in a much shorter time, is again, frankly preposterous.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I am sorry to make this point in the absence of the hon. Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham), because I am sure that he would want to say something about it. However, is it not also the case that, in looking at the travel time, the failure to consider other options for High Peak patients, outside the Greater Manchester conurbation, also calls the decision into question?

[Mr Brady]

Yes, absolutely; that is an important point. Without venturing too far into the realms of legal opinion and the judicial review that we could face, what makes the decision so demonstrably unreasonable is the failure to take account of a known factor that will materially change the travel times on which that decision is purported to have been based.

Furthermore, it is questionable policy to proceed with such profound changes to services at the same time as another review was going on. It may be sensible to proceed with some of the shared service propositions for UHSM and Central Manchester—that may be the way forward and may lead to better outcomes for patients in both trusts, and it should certainly be explored—but seeking to arrive at agreement on that while the Healthier Together process was still to conclude was deeply questionable and is a source of serious concern for us all.

I will not rehearse the long list of outstanding tertiary services offered by Wythenshawe not only to Greater Manchester, north Cheshire and north Wales but far beyond. We are debating hospital services in south Manchester, but as the hon. Gentleman reminded us, we are also talking about a hospital that provides the most complex tertiary services for a much wider area. Clearly, therefore, the issue is more significant, and it is more important to get it right, than would be the case were the hospital providing important tertiary services merely for a local population.

The consultants who have spoken to me—I am sure that they have also spoken to my friends on the Opposition Benches—have been very clear. There is no question that they are trying to defend their own patch or their own empire; some are constituents whom I have known for many years, and many of them are at a point in their careers when they really do not need to be concerned about those things. Some are very eminent in their fields, and when they tell me that their concerns are purely about patient safety—they say that they are entirely open to sensible proposals for reorganisation, shared service agreements and so on, but that they are worried that the work being done at UHSM could be threatened and could, in the hon. Gentleman’s words, suffer death by a thousand cuts—I am inclined to take those concerns seriously.

To boil the consultants’ concerns down to the simplest level, their analysis is that the high level of complex tertiary services at Wythenshawe can continue into the long term only if it benefits from an equally high level of general surgical support to ensure that different, co-dependent services and procedures can always be provided in the safest way. The hon. Gentleman said very clearly and correctly that, in the consultants’ view, the provision of general surgery would remain at an appropriate level only if Wythenshawe remained a receiving centre for complex general surgery. If the same level of support is not present—we have all seen how this works—it will be only a matter of time before we find ourselves here again, with a new review suggesting that it really is not safe to perform heart and lung transplants at Wythenshawe, because it lacks the necessary general surgical support when complications arise.

The consultants make a powerful and plausible case. First, there is the procedural case that Healthier Together has been flawed and that the process and decision were unreasonable. I also find it compelling when they say that having a certain level of general surgical support is the only way to protect the complex services that are provided at the moment.