North West Ambulance Service

Liz McInnes Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Tony Lloyd]

Absolutely. If this is one of the skill shortages at the crisis end of our health service, let us begin to use the paramedics much more intelligently than we do now. The Minister will be delighted to know that I will come on to money, but this is not about money; it is about intelligence. I am bemused by the incompetence of the management of the North West Ambulance Service, who do not seem able to give me even semi-credible answers to this crisis. Ministers now need to seize the opportunity—and possibly even seize the throats of those who manage the process—to make them begin to deliver.

Nothing I have said tonight is meant in anything other than absolute admiration for the people who are in our ambulances, trying to make the service work. They live very stressful lives. The Minister will know that across the country—the north-west is as bad as many places—the amount of down time because of paramedics and ambulance technicians being off work from stress-related sickness is high and growing. That is symptomatic of a system going terribly wrong. Let us reform it. Let us make sure that we put the quality of life back into their jobs, so that they can put the quality of life back into those they care for.

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend and I share the same area, covered by the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, and we have very similar experiences. I used to work at the North Manchester General Hospital and at the Royal Oldham Hospital, and I am well aware of the issues. Is he aware of the latest Care Quality Commission report, which was published last year, on the North West Ambulance Service? It identified safety and leadership as “requiring improvement”. From the story that he is telling, it sounds as though those two issues have not been addressed, and that report was produced a year ago.

[Tony Lloyd]

My hon. Friend makes a really interesting point. The Minister needs to look seriously at the consequences of that kind of report. I have looked at different aspects of this issue over a number of years. I find leadership mainly in its absence. Safety is more difficult for me to comment on, except that if we have such high sickness rates among the staff, it very much indicates that the working environment is not safe for the people we want to work there.

My final point to the Minister is that we have a shortage of paramedics nationwide. As I said, we have had an uplift of something like 50% in the most critical cases in the north-west and an increase of some 16% in the number of paramedics. We are simply not keeping pace. Of course this is about money, but we have to put the resources into that kind of training. However, training is between two and four years. The Minister has to look at whether there is something in the intelligent transfer of people in the health service who already have the equivalent skills. With the right kind of incentive, they may be prepared to move across from different occupations in the health service to the paramedic and ambulance service. However, they will only do that if they believe there is a quality of job that would allow them to enjoy their work, as they are entitled to.

We have a crisis that is putting people at risk, whether that is in the east of England or in the north-west, as I and my hon. Friends the Members for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) and for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) have said. It is dangerous and in the case of my constituent, Pat Gerner, it is unacceptable for an elderly lady, needing to be in hospice care, to be treated in the way that she has. I look to the Minister to give not simply sympathy, but some credible belief that he will seize the day and make sure that we have the quality and determination to drive through the kind of management change that will make a difference. As well as that, he has to say to his colleagues in the Treasury that we need to see some transfer of resource into our ambulance service, if we are not going to face this crisis not simply in the winter, but every day of every week of the year.