Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill
3:45 pm
Dr Evan Harris (Oxford West and Abingdon, Liberal Democrat)
If the Under-Secretary were taking part in this part of the debate, I suspect that he would say that if the royal colleges removed the junior doctors and it was impossible to staff the unit with sufficient doctors, the only safe practice would be a midwife-led service. That should not cause a problem for the regulator, given its general duties under clause 3 to have regard to safety and co-operate with CHAI,
because CHAI would step in if the unit tried to continue to run the service when it was not safe. I hope that it would step in. He is right that there are tensions with regard to geography, and I thought that his summary of that was excellent. However, I suspect that the answer would be that there is not really a clash—one must go for safety and quality.