Tulip Siddiq
Main Page: Tulip Siddiq (Labour - Hampstead and Highgate)Department Debates - View all Tulip Siddiq's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Tulip Siddiq
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. I apologise, because I have to run off in half an hour for an appointment at the Royal Free hospital’s maternity unit. The birth rate is the highest since the 1970s, yet maternity wards in London have been closing left, right and centre. Elizabeth Duff from the National Childbirth Trust has pointed out how disruptive that is to women’s pregnancy and labour. Will my hon. Friend share her experience of the closure of the maternity unit in her constituency?
Dr Huq
I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent intervention, which is very pertinent to where she is going after this debate. As a mother who has been through these services, I know that it is massively disrupting if the goalposts are suddenly moved, causing people to travel for longer to get to their appointments. The closure of Ealing hospital’s maternity unit was called a consolidation. It was meant to be part of the centralisation of services, but it has had really adverse effects.
Tulip Siddiq
As my hon. Friend is aware, junior doctors are poised to withdraw emergency cover for 48 hours in April. Does she agree that the Health Secretary’s comments, such as those about the British Medical Association being
“brilliantly clever at winding everyone up on social media”,
show his total disregard for medical professionals who are quite capable of knowing a bad deal when they see it?
Dr Huq
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The Health Secretary is the one who is winding everyone up. It cannot be advisable to make staff feel undervalued and overworked. The health service cannot run on good will alone, nor can pharmacists and other such professions. The imposition of a new contract that is overwhelmingly opposed by the vast majority of junior doctors is part of a pattern. The majority of NHS staff have faced pay freezes or real-terms cuts in recent years. The Government should accept that they cannot keep asking everyone to do more and more for less and less.
With such a vast topic, there is never time to cover everything. As I said, I did not want to make this speech a blizzard of statistics, so I will briefly highlight one constituent’s case, then I will make some concluding remarks. Bree Robbins, from Ealing Common, actually ended up not coming to my surgery because she was in too much pain to make it in person, so we took up her case on the phone. Her issue is access to breast reconstruction surgery, and there is a question for the Minister here. My constituent was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. She underwent a mastectomy and then suffered an infection, which meant that the reconstruction was delayed. Eventually, she underwent partial reconstruction in January at Charing Cross hospital. She now needs that to be completed, but she is experiencing continued delays, even though she is in pain.
The response from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust explained that the delay was due to an increase in urgent cancer cases in the plastic and reconstruction department. That is highly unsatisfactory for my constituent and prompts the question, what are the Government doing to ensure that those awaiting breast reconstruction surgery will undergo it in a timely manner, without having to face delays of three years, as my constituents do?
Ealing has an expanding population. Today, the House of Commons Library confirmed that, paradoxically, the number and percentage of the population aged under 18 and aged over 65 are increasing. Those are the two demographics that need NHS services most. The young and old populations seem to be getting bigger—I feel that I am “the squeezed middle”, to coin a phrase, as I am a mother and a daughter who has to run off to NHS services for offspring and parents.
No one doubts the need for comprehensive weekend care and for efficiencies to be made, but too often such plans amount to cutting corners. We heard in the Budget statement about the need for devolution, but the centralisation that we have discussed today is at odds with that. Pharmacists in my constituency fear that, ultimately, they will be merged with GP surgeries—or co-located or whatever it is called—contrary to popular need. People like to have such services at the end of their street.
Cuts are being targeted at the most deprived communities. There is a lot of distrust about the public consultation, “Shaping a Healthier Future”, because it was so flawed. We have mentioned the escalating costs, and the changes are not good value for taxpayers; they are a waste of precious public resources and involve no business plan.
I have not gone into the Government’s long-standing ambition to integrate NHS health services with council-run care services for the elderly. Ealing is not one of the pilot boroughs, so I will leave that subject to my colleagues. Nor are we a pilot borough for the health devolution deal, announced at the end of last year by Simon Stevens, but I will end with his words at the launch. He said:
“In London’s NHS, we’ve got some of the best health services anywhere on the planet, but also some of the most pressurised. London is the world’s most dynamic and diverse city—why shouldn’t it be the healthiest?”
I am sure that both Opposition and Government Members agree, and I am interested to hear other contributions to the debate.