Heart Surgery (Leeds) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
John Bercow
Main Page: John Bercow (Speaker - Buckingham)Department Debates - View all John Bercow's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(11 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Mr Hunt
Whenever he receives information, the medical director is under an absolute obligation to act. What he did was absolutely correct: he said that he would look at the data and get to the bottom of them and that if it turned out that the data were not as accurate as they should have been, surgery would resume. That is exactly what happened.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) is a very excitable fellow—he might remind some people of his predecessor in the House in that respect.
Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)
A baby born with a heart condition in Sheffield who needs a complex intervention would normally go to Leeds. One of the concerns about the Safe and Sustainable review was that children from my constituency would have had to travel further. The decision to suspend the Leeds unit created that very situation. The Secretary of State needs to acknowledge that children could, as it turns out, have been put at risk unnecessarily by closing a unit that was in fact safe, because they would have had to travel further, which for very ill babies is a risk in itself. At the heart of this has been a lack of transparency and a failure to put information into the public domain. I have had to table parliamentary questions to try to get information about what is happening. Nobody wants an unsafe situation. Will the Secretary of State now commit to complete transparency in respect of all the information?