NHS Major Incidents

Sarah Wollaston Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

In the right hon. Gentleman’s desperate desire to weaponise the NHS, I am afraid that Labour has sunk to new depths today. He said in the media this morning that the Government had put news management over patient safety. That is ironic coming from him, given that so many officials testified to Francis about the pressure they were put under not to come out with bad news when he was Health Secretary. Even the head of the Care Quality Commission was roasted because she wanted to publish details of the problems that were happening in the NHS under Labour and he did not want that to happen when he was Health Secretary. That news management stopped the moment he walked out the door, and those days are over.

As confirmed by NHS England this morning, this was an operational decision; it was nothing to do with Ministers. This was the local NHS doing its best to get good guidelines out in a tough winter. [Interruption.] It is a local decision. The right hon. Gentleman is the man who talks—he did not deliver this in office—a lot about integration. It is absolutely right that a local hospital should talk to the rest of the local NHS to check about the impact of any decision it makes on major incidents, to make sure that patients are treated safely—is he now saying to this House that local hospitals should not talk to the rest of the NHS? That is what these guidelines say. This was a period when we had 16 major incidents, but that number has gone right down because performance on accident and emergency is significantly—[Interruption.] This is the underlying point, because the reason we have fewer major incidents is that A and E performance has got better. This is the week when we discovered that public satisfaction with the NHS jumped five points last year. This is the week when NHS unions have put patients first by suspending their strike, and Labour focuses not on patients, but on politics. On patients, he did not want to talk about the Welsh ambulance service publishing its worst ever figures, although the Labour leader says that we should be looking at what is going on in Wales.

Let us be clear: where Labour runs the NHS we have double the number of people waiting at A and E; double the number of people waiting too long for ambulances; and 10 times the number of people waiting for their operations. We have seen Labour today in Wales and Labour before covering up around Mid Staffs, ignoring patients and weaponising the NHS for political advantage—has the right hon. Gentleman not proved today that Labour is still not fit to run the NHS?

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

Our hard-working NHS staff and, more importantly, patients need to have absolute confidence that the Secretary of State will never lean on operational decision making in these circumstances and will always allow that decision making to take place at the appropriate local level, backed, if necessary, by national guidance.

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that. It is why many people in the NHS will be so astonished to hear the shadow Secretary of State, who presided over a culture where precisely that kind of leaning from on high happened, making it difficult for people to make those local operational decisions in the interests of patients, now trying to make a political point. This was a local decision and it was confirmed today that Ministers had no involvement in it, and Labour should stop trying to score political points.