Dr Andrew Murrison (Westbury, Conservative)

I rise in support of my right hon. Friend's comments. I alluded to one constituency which needed special consideration and is a good exemplar of the sort of dilemmas that my right hon. Friend touched upon; the military constituency. We must give some thought to unusual groups such as those who use military district general hospital units, MDHUs. A good example is that in Selly Oak. The patient base for Selly Oak is many miles from Selly Oak and Birmingham and may be in Portsmouth or Aldershot. It is difficult to see from the Bill how patients from the military constituency will be represented at such hospitals. I hope that Ministers will focus on that specific example because the matter

is of great concern to me as the Member of Parliament for a fairly military constituency.

I hope that they will also examine the more general point of how to deal with non-straightforward constituencies. I suspect that once we scratch a little further at the conundrum, we will find that many hospitals have an unusual and not dissimilar patient base. We need to ensure that they, too, are properly represented. The example that I gave is quite a good one; for instance, if Selly Oak hospital became a foundation hospital, its governing body would have an interest in excluding that group of patients.

Something of a dialogue is always going on between the military and the NHS in the running of MDHUs. Indeed, I seem to remember that when they were being set up, the NHS had no great appetite for establishing MDHUs within their hospitals. I can foresee foundation hospitals seeking to exclude that particular part of its business, and they would have no incentive to include the military, as the constituency is defined by the hospital. The Health Committee's report on foundation hospitals was right to identity that problem, and it is for the Government to set the parameters when defining what is meant by ''constituency'' rather than leaving it to foundation hospitals.

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