NHS Reorganisation

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I want to focus on one specific part of the Government’s plans, which has already been mentioned by a couple of my hon. Friends and by the former Secretary of State for Health, my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson). It is the funding of our children’s hospitals.

I am fortunate enough to have at the heart of my constituency Sheffield children’s hospital, which is a centre of excellence for the region and for the country. It offers pioneering services in trauma and orthopaedics, it is a regional centre for the whole of the north of England for burns injuries and the principal treatment centre for South Yorkshire for childhood cancers, and its metabolic bone service is accessed from across the UK. It does a superb job treating some of our most critically ill children and I want to use one example to bring to light the importance of its work.

A young girl was left unconscious on the streets of Derbyshire with devastating brain injuries after being hit by a car. She was 13 years old. She was transferred to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where a scan revealed the full extent of her head injuries. She was seen to have diffuse axonal injury, one of the most devastating types of traumatic brain injury and, as the Secretary of State will know, a major cause of long-term unconsciousness. She was moved to the children’s hospital’s neurosciences unit, which has specialist equipment to support her rehabilitation and expert consultant neurosurgeons—these are crucial points. Her mother said:

“The doctors and nurses were wonderful and really did go above the call of duty to provide the very best care and treatment. The ward manager was like a second mum to her. The team cared for her like a member of their own family. She is now back at home, relearning simple things such as walking and talking. There is a long road ahead, but if it was not for the Children’s Hospital she wouldn’t be here.”

Such cases involve staff from many disciplines and services to ensure that the patient makes the best recovery possible. Neurosciences are one of the trust’s flagship services, treating children who have suffered brain injuries or who have other brain conditions, spinal cord conditions, diseases such as meningitis or conditions such as epilepsy. The intensive care unit is part of the hospital’s state-of-the-art critical care facility for children and is situated alongside high-dependency and neonatal surgical units, meaning that all the critical care services are in close proximity.

Such services come at a cost, however, and I have always understood that that is why we have had a top-up tariff to pay for the extra staff and the additional support needed to provide that specialist care to very young patients. We now understand that the Government plan—they might be in discussions, but we understand that this is the plan—to cut the tariff to less than a third of its current value.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that that puts a whole new slant on the saying, “Women and children first”?

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Blomfield]

I certainly would. To cut the tariff from 78 to 25% is the most outrageous proposal on health care to have come from this Government.

When questioned on this issue—this is extraordinary—a spokeswoman from the Department of Health said, very casually,

“less than 10 hospitals are likely to be affected significantly by these changes and the tariff is not their only source of income.”

We are talking about 10 of the leading hospitals that care for our children. Let us be clear: the Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust has estimated that the change could cut its budget by as much as £4.9 million. That is a reduction of almost 10% in its total funding. It has said that that

“would have a serious impact on the hospital finances and ability to deliver some services.”

[Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)]

I am very pleased that the hon. Gentleman has an excellent hospital in his constituency. Will he advise me why the Labour party set in train the closure of Burnley’s children’s ward when it was in power, leaving an area of Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale and more than 250,000 people without a children’s ward, never mind a children’s hospital?

[Paul Blomfield]

I can certainly talk at length about the enormous investment that we made in our hospitals and health services and about the tremendous difference that that made to patients and to reducing the waiting lists that we inherited in 1997. However, I want to make the point about the impact on Sheffield children’s hospital. As the hospital said, the change will have a serious impact on its ability to deliver services that provide critical interventions for those whom we should be protecting most—our children. If the Government are prepared to attack these budgets in such a way, what will the commitment to guarantee health spending increases in real terms in each year of this Parliament be other than another broken promise?