Kettering General Hospital

Tom Pursglove Excerpts

Friday 21st October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hollobone]

You will know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that my hon. Friend has a great way of simplifying complex issues to make them readily understandable. His intervention is just another example of that.

NHS England has told Her Majesty’s Government that it is targeting the clinical commissioning groups that are more than 5% above or below the target funding, that both Nene and Corby CCGs are underfunded, and that the cash increase of 5.2% for Nene and 9.4% for Corby in 2016-17 will bring us within that 5% zone. This suggests that we are outside it at the moment. The fact that we are more than 5% away from the target funding and that we have one of the most rapidly increasing populations in the country illustrates the stiff challenge that Kettering general hospital faces.

[Tom Pursglove (Corby) (Con)]

Residents in Corby and elsewhere in east Northamptonshire are proud of their hospital, as are my hon. Friend’s constituents in Kettering. One of the challenges that goes with a growth agenda is the need for new infrastructure to support new homes. Does he agree that the new urgent care hub in north Northamptonshire, which we are all campaigning for, will be crucial not only for securing health services in our area, taking the pressure off A&E and meeting the growing needs of new residents moving into our area, but for meeting the Government’s agenda on the better integration of health services?

[Mr Hollobone]

One of the advantages of working closely with my fellow Members of Parliament is that we begin to read each other’s minds. My hon. Friend’s observation leads me seamlessly on to section 2 of my speech, which is entitled “Urgent care hub”.

In many ways, this is the most exciting challenge that the hospital faces. The idea of an urgent care hub is to have on one site, at Kettering general hospital, a one-stop shop for GP services and out-of-hours care, an on-site pharmacy, a minor injuries unit, facilities for social services and mental health care, access to community care services for the frail elderly and a replacement for the hospital’s A&E department, which, as I have said, is more than 20 years old.

The three local MPs are working hard on this issue but, frankly, we need more support from the Minister. The hospital has drawn up ambitious proposals to develop the urgent care hub, which could cost between £20 million and £30 million. It is exactly the sort of thing that NHS England has highlighted in its “Five Year Forward View” as the way forward, and it enjoyed the support of the previous Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter). In a debate in Westminster Hall on 24 March 2015, he said:

“The principle of the hub is absolutely the right way forward for the local NHS. It is the type of integrated care model that we need elsewhere in the country, particularly where the NHS is servicing a broad population. In this case, it is servicing not just Kettering, but a partially rural county and rural area. This is a model that I am sure hon. Members will continue to support and that I will continue to have a keen interest in supporting. I hope the plans will be successful at making the improvements that patients in my hon. Friend’s constituency and the area surrounding Kettering want. There are encouraging signs. The improvements envisaged are significant and would ensure that the local area had a resilient and high-quality health care system to deliver the highest-quality patient care.”—[Official Report, 24 March 2015; Vol. 594, c. 440WH.]

Would the Minister be kind enough to visit Kettering general hospital to look at the proposals for an urgent care hub? I am going to be pestering him at every Health questions this Parliament, and it would greatly assist the quality of his answers if he is able to visit the hospital and then speak from a position of knowledge. Kettering general hospital could lead a pioneering development for our country’s NHS.

That brings me to the wider issue of funding for the estate at Kettering general hospital. A small or medium district general hospital such as Kettering, which is on an ageing town-centre site, will inevitably have a great backlog of maintenance and equipment that needs to be replaced every year. The hospital spends something like £10 million to £15 million of capital each year through loans, unhelpfully swelling the balance sheet. The financial pressure on the hospital is clearly huge. The capital programme for next year is largely made up of three items: £5 million on a maintenance backlog; just over £1 million on IT infrastructure; and almost £1.5 million on medical equipment. The Minister needs to make the point to the Chancellor that there is currently no capital support for the strategic transformation plans.

Transforming district general hospitals up and down the country will be difficult. Nevertheless, Kettering general hospital is innovating. It has installed a new modular unit to try to upgrade the A&E, with 13 major bays for complex medical and surgical needs. I remind the Minister that Kettering’s A&E now treats 83,000 patients. It was designed to treat 40,000 and was built 20 years ago. Some £5 million has been spent on a new maternity unit, bringing state-of-the-art maternity services to the hospital, where 3,800 babies are delivered and 2,000 gynaecological and obstetric theatre procedures are carried out every year. Those developments are fantastic, but they are expensive and difficult for the Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust to afford.

My fourth point of five is about the national IT roll-out. Hospitals experience difficulties in complying with necessary advances in linking their IT systems to regional and national services. One example is the problem that local patients have experienced in getting their X-ray results. There is meant to be an integrated east midlands system for X-rays, but Kettering has experienced difficulties, and some delays in getting X-rays to patients have lasted three or four months, which the hospital admits is unacceptable. The Minister needs to be made aware of the IT challenge faced by district general hospitals.

On the workforce, Kettering is succeeding in recruiting staff, which is good news, but there are still vacancies. Of 1,200 nursing posts, 80 remain vacant as of today. Many of the nurses come from Europe and elsewhere. The hospital has recruited 72 European nurses and the good news is that 95% of them have stayed with the trust—the national average retention rate is 28%. On the Minister’s visit to the hospital, he will be able to learn from a good example of how to retain hard-working staff, and he may be able to apply that elsewhere. In Kettering, 61% of people voted to leave the European Union, a fact of which I am hugely proud, but when we negotiate our Brexit terms and conditions, we must make provision to retain key personnel from the EU who bring to our country the skills we need and are unable to find among our own people.

Kettering general is a very good hospital, but it is under a huge amount of pressure. There are things that the Government can do to make it succeed. Along with my hon. Friends the Members for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) and for Corby (Tom Pursglove), I will be on the Minister’s case for the rest of this Parliament to make sure that our hospital works properly and successfully, delivering the local patient care that people need and deserve.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) on securing such an important debate and on the fact that he has consistently been a champion for Kettering’s hospital. I am grateful to the Minister for making the effort to come here today to listen to this debate. Perhaps if he is able to visit Kettering general hospital, he will stop on the way to see the Isebrook hospital at Wellingborough, which is what I briefly wish to talk about.

The Isebrook hospital is what we might call a community hospital. At the moment, it is undergoing a refurbishment to provide new X-ray equipment. Our issue is that we should have a minor accident and emergency unit there. It is part of the overall hub plan, but because that plan has got bogged down in red tape and administration, the Isebrook expansion has not taken place. That is a mistake, because if we had such a unit at the Isebrook, 40% of the people who now go to Kettering’s A&E would not need to go there, which would save an immense amount of money. By spending a little money now, we could save a lot of money, as well as make things much better for my constituents.

[Tom Pursglove]

We know that that is categorically the case, because Corby has the hugely popular and successful Corby urgent care centre, which was delivered under a Conservative Government and works incredibly well. Local people go there, rather than to Kettering general hospital. The hub-and-spoke approach is exactly the way forward, and my hon. Friend’s constituency would benefit from it in the same way as Corby has.

[Mr Bone]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. He is so active in Corby that it is no wonder that he has got his minor accident and emergency centre ahead of me, but we cannot have a hub-and-spoke system if one of the spokes is not there. It would not be a bad idea for the Minister to come and see physically why this unit is such a good idea.

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Philip Dunne)]

What a pleasure it is to join you this afternoon to participate in this debate on Kettering hospital, Madam Deputy Speaker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), not just on securing this debate, but on his persistence in keeping Kettering hospital at the forefront of the national debate on what is happening to our health service. He has taken an assiduous interest in promoting it at almost every opportunity, as he suggested today. Indeed, he raised the matter at my first Health questions earlier this month and was on his feet raising it again with the Prime Minister the following day. He is a worthy champion of the cause, and I am therefore fully aware of his interest in local health matters affecting his constituents.

I wish to join my hon. Friend in recognising at the outset the great work done by all our staff in the NHS right across the country, but particularly the staff who work in and around Kettering and the other hospitals we have heard of today from my hon. Friends the Members for Corby (Tom Pursglove) and for Wellingborough (Mr Bone). I was invited by two of the three Members who have spoken to attend their local hospitals—

[Tom Pursglove]

You are very welcome to Corby, too.

[Mr Dunne]

My hon. Friend, from a sedentary position, extends an invitation, too. I am grateful to all three hon. Friends. I am relatively newly in post, and the demands at present are to visit hospitals that are in greater difficulty than any of these cases, but I will endeavour to see what I can do during next year possibly to visit Kettering.