NHS in London
Debate between Stephen Hammond and Paul Scully(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Paul Scully
Obviously he did not, which is why I won the election against him—[Interruption.] It is funny. I think the tale was that he resigned, but I do not know a lot of Ministers who would resign to save a hospital when they were one of the Ministers in charge. Others have reported that he was sacked. I do not know the truth, and I am not sure we will ever know.
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)
For the sake of clarity, I am in the next-door seat to my hon. Friend and many of my constituents look to St Helier hospital. An outrageous campaign was run by the Labour party in 2014, completely without foundation, about the hospital closing. It was at the time of the local government elections, when the Government, all the management of St Helier and all the board papers showed that there was no plan to close the hospital. It was exactly as my hon. Friend says: a scare story.
Paul Scully
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, and he is absolutely correct. It is why we need some degree of certainty. For many years now, we have had such things as “Better Healthcare Closer to Home” and “Better Services Better Value”—an alphabet soup of NHS changes, with no degree of certainty for residents or staff in that hospital. A lot of the BSBV review was clinician-led, but it was based on the premise that they wanted to concentrate consultants in certain places—in my case, at St George’s hospital in Tooting—because they did not have enough consultants in each of the different hospitals seeing enough of the more unusual cases; they wanted to concentrate expertise.
Imagine a whole load of politicians in Sutton telling residents time and again that the hospital is about to close, as my hon. Friend just said. Where would a newly qualified consultant want to go and practise? Would they want to go to a hospital that they are being told is about to close down, or would they go just up the road to one that receives all the plaudits and which has all the concentration of expertise? I know what I would do. If people talk down their local hospital and healthcare, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They may be in danger of getting a result that is exactly the opposite of what they seek.