Children’s Cardiac Surgery (Glenfield)

Martin Vickers Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

It is a pleasure once again to take part in a debate under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I join other hon. Members in congratulating my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) on securing the debate.

I feel like something of an intruder, coming from the remote parts of Lincolnshire to this east midlands event. I rise to speak because many of my constituents’ children and grandchildren have received treatment at Glenfield and Leeds, and I have campaigned with my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) for the retention of the Leeds unit. We have centres of excellence and we want to retain them. My constituency is at the end of the line and somewhat remote, so the geography of where people receive life-or-death treatment is of particular concern. We joined the campaign for the Leeds unit and heard from parents how the distance to the life-saving unit has made a big difference. Cleethorpes is 80 miles from Leeds and 90 miles from Leicester.

The alternatives suggested to my constituents—in Newcastle—have been a significant factor in the opposition to the proposed changes. We already feel remote and out of it. I do not want to be frivolous, but if, for example, some of my constituents were involved in an accident, Humberside police would attend and summon an ambulance from the east midlands, which would then take them to Grimsby hospital, which is administered by the Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. All these factors give people a sense of unease, and a sense that they are at the end of the line and do not matter. It is essential that we ensure that services are as close as possible to the people.

Parents will go to the ends of the earth to take their children to emergency treatment, but as a national health service we have to ensure that services are, wherever possible, as close as possible to the centres of population. We need to bear in mind the need to have centres of excellence, which, as the clinicians constantly tell us, means more and more concentration, but remoteness will mean that these proposals are unlikely to be achieved.

[Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an important point. The Safe and Sustainable review found, from its own independent advice, that patients in his constituency would not travel to the units that would be kept open under the proposals.

[Martin Vickers]

My hon. Friend is right. I think it was proposed that the likely number of operations taking place in Newcastle would be 403. That will not be achieved, because people in Cleethorpes and northern Lincolnshire will not travel to Newcastle; they will look for alternatives. With doubts being cast on the centre at Birmingham, inevitably, if Leeds and Glenfield closed, people would gravitate south rather than towards Newcastle.

We have heard expressions of concern about the process of consultation, and there is no doubt that the view that the consultation was flawed is widespread. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey drew attention to that in an Adjournment debate a few weeks ago. I appreciate that the Minister said, in an intervention, that the review was by clinicians. The problem is that clinicians always tend to want to gather together in more and bigger centres of excellence, and our constituents want as local a service as possible.

I hope that when the Minister and the Secretary of State make their decision they will consider other aspects. The expertise of the professionals is important, but access to services is also important. The last thing that people want is a decision that comes from a review by people they do not know and about whom they are doubtful—expert opinion—at the best of times. They want the Secretary of State to weigh up all the factors, not just the expertise. Parents and grandparents of children who have received treatment from these units know, from personal experience, the care and attention that they provide, and they fear being shunted away.

We have centres of excellence. Please, Minister, do not rubber stamp a review that wants to close them. Consider, first of all, the children who are treated by these centres.