EU Working Time Directive (NHS)

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Charlotte Leslie]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point, and I know that he has first-hand experience in this area.

Professional expertise and intuition, not looking at a list of tick boxes, enables doctors to spot that something is wrong with a patient. If doctors are not able to make a subtle comparison between how a patient was yesterday and how they are today, their intuition and expertise will be undermined. We have all seen constituents who have felt that they have been subject to an endless conveyor belt of doctors, and have been made to feel like a product on a conveyor belt instead of the focus of a dedicated team looking after them. The move to treating patients as products on a conveyor belt is worrying, and undermines the very good ethos of our NHS. Clinicians back that up. One third of surgeons in a recent survey said that handovers had been inadequate and, worryingly, the Royal College of Physicians found that three in 10 thought that their hospitals’ ability to deliver continuity of care was poor or worse. A similar survey of GPs found that one third thought that their hospitals’ treatment was dangerous. I cannot emphasise enough the urgency of the matter.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

To add to the chorus of support, one of my constituents is John Black, a famous surgeon from Worcester, and past president of the Royal College of Surgeons, who told me that if there was one thing the Government could do for the NHS, it would be to take up this issue and get it sorted out. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government must take up the cudgels with Europe and fight for our interests?

[Charlotte Leslie]

My hon. Friend anticipates a point that I will come to later. I pay tribute to the work of John Black and others on this issue. If there was only one target that the NHS should enshrine, it is continuity of care, because after that so many things follow.

European Court of Justice rulings—I do not want to be too technical, but they are the SiMAP and Jaeger rulings—have caused tremendous problems for the profession. First, inactive on-call work is required to be counted as working time. Therefore, if a doctor is on call but inactive and perhaps sleeping on the premises, it is counted as on-call time, which makes life very difficult for hospital trusts organising rotas and getting the time available. Secondly, if a doctor overstays their allocated shift, perhaps because they are about to hand over, but have to stay on for an extra hour, perhaps because a patient has had a cardiac arrest, they are required to take compensatory rest to make up for that immediately afterwards. If that doctor has a clinic some time the next day, they will have to take an hour of rest time, cancelling that clinic, because the European Court of Justice dictates that. Potentially, patients who have turned up at hospital and are ready and prepared for surgery will have their clinic cancelled because the Court ruling says that the doctor must be forced to take rest. That is obviously a tremendous inconvenience for patients, beyond continuity of care, and a nightmare for the hospitals trying to make accommodations.