Management of the National Health Service

Part of Opposition Day — [15th Allotted Day] – in the House of Commons at 9:11 pm on 9 May 2006.

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Photo of Maria Miller Maria Miller Shadow Minister (Education) 9:11, 9 May 2006

We have had a wide-ranging debate today, so I shall keep my comments brief and focus on some of the pertinent issues.

The people of Basingstoke are proud of their health care professionals: we are proud that we have one of the top 40 hospitals in the country; we are proud that we have world leaders in bowel and liver cancer in North Hampshire hospital; and we are very proud of the Ark, which is a medical research and learning centre located at the hospital. We have a team of dedicated professionals, who do a very good job.

In response to my questions about the future of health care in my constituency, the Minister usually blames people on the ground for our problems—in my part of the world, the health care crisis is real. I think that the origins of the problem lie not with the people who work in my constituency, but with the Department of Health, which needs to take a long, hard look at its own management before pointing at people who live in north Hampshire.

The financial crisis in north Hampshire is real, but the problem runs deeper and stems from management practices in the Department of Health. Unless those problems are addressed, we will continue to pump taxpayers' money into a structurally dysfunctional organisation. What is structurally dysfunctional about the Department of Health or, using language that the Government understand, where does the systemic failure lie? In too many cases, there is no link between the central strategies followed by the Department of Health and what is delivered on the ground. The Government are trying to micro-manage from Whitehall, but they do not take responsibility when things start to unravel on the ground in our constituencies, and we have heard many examples of that today. I follow my hon. Friend Anne Milton in hoping that Ministers are listening to the problems, which are real.

I shall give the House two brief examples. A key plank of Department of Health strategy is to move patients from being treated in an acute setting in hospital to being treated in the community. We have been told that that strategy reflects the patients' desire to be treated closer to home. In my experience, most patients want to be treated in the most appropriate place, which should be down to doctors, but we have been told to follow that strategy in order to reduce referrals to secondary care and to control the financial situation. GPs in my constituency have acted responsibly and organised themselves to take the challenge seriously and to examine delivering services in GP surgeries which have historically been delivered in hospital. However, we have no community hospitals in my constituency.

We have identified at least four surgeries that need a lot of investment, possibly even new accommodation, in order to be able to increase services of the kind that the Government are talking about. Staff at our doctors' surgeries are working in intolerable conditions, which I could go through in detail if time allowed. Despite the Government's strategy of trying to take people out of acute services and into our community, there is simply no money available from the primary care trust for any new doctors' surgeries to fulfil either the strategy of trying to increase the services that are available through surgeries or the demands of the many thousands of new people who are moving to Basingstoke every single year.

Our GPs have had problems with regard to the Department's accounting practices, which are beyond me. As a simple person who has been in business for about 17 years, I find that the way in which the Department tries to put together accounting practices is for the benefit of nobody but itself. When doctors look at creative ways of trying to improve services for their patients, financial limitations, in the shape of accounting procedures, are put in their way. That is deplorable.

As I said, a key plank of the Department's strategy is to move more patients from being treated in an acute setting in hospital to being treated in the community, but there is no money to invest to make it become a reality. It needs to take a long, hard look at that short-termism, which is destabilising the long-term robustness of the community health service in my constituency.

That level of dysfunction does not end there; it extends to departmental announcements that have no way of being delivered on the ground. One example that will have led to similar problems for many other hon. Members is that of IVF treatment. When the Department—indeed, the then Secretary of State, who is now Home Secretary—announced that by 1 April 2005 all hospitals would be able to provide at least one cycle of IVF treatment, that built up the hopes of a great many of our constituents. It received good media coverage for that—just before a general election, I seem to recall—but the reality is that health care providers in our constituencies cannot provide that service on the ground. There was no more money to deliver, and the result was a great deal of distress and pain for people who deserve better. It does not seem to matter much to the Department whether the headline matches the reality.

I am supporting the motion because I believe that the dysfunction in the health care service starts at the top, in the Department of Health, and it must be finished very quickly.