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Queen Mary’s Hospital (Sidcup)
John Austin (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab): The hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Derek Conway) has highlighted the anxiety felt by his constituents and those of other Members present. People are attached to their local hospitals for very good reasons, and he has identified some of the reasons why so many people are attached to Queen Mary’s, Sidcup.
We need an assurance from the Minister that there will continue to be four hospitals serving the boroughs of Bromley, Bexley, Greenwich and Lewisham, whatever the outcome of the consultations. Queen Mary’s has been financially challenged, but there has been a turnaround both financially and in quality of care.
The Bexley Care Trust is, however, more financially challenged, and some of us fear that some of its proposals have been financially driven rather than patient-driven. Maternity services offer an example of that. According to the Royal College of Midwives, a unit needs to have 3,000 births per year to be registered for training, and it also needs to meet that target for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to be able to guarantee obstetric cover. The care trust has told us that the number of births has been falling below that. I would be the first person to say that the unit might need to change if it were not meeting such targets, but the care trust made its calculation in terms of the places it had commissioned at the hospital, ignoring those coming from the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) and from Bromley. As the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup said, there are more than 3,000 births this year, and there is no reason to close the maternity unit on the grounds that it cannot meet the RCM or RCOG figures.
With accident and emergency, I accept that there might be an argument for change. There might be a cogent argument for there to be fewer accident and emergency units. If I suffered a stroke or a cardiac arrest, I would not necessarily want to be taken to my nearest accident and emergency unit. If I had a stroke, I would want to go to a specialist unit where a proper diagnosis could be made instantly as to what kind of stroke it was, so that the right treatment could be given—and similarly with cardiac arrest. However, the proposal that Bromley, Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley should go from having four acute trauma and accident and emergency units to two shows complete ignorance of the traffic situation in that area and the transport infrastructure.
I also think the proposals are premature. There is a great deal of merit in what Professor Darzi has suggested about, for example, the treatment of stroke and cardiac disease. Let us consider other conditions, too. If someone close to me had breast cancer I would not want them to go to the nearest general hospital to be seen by some general surgeon who does a bit of this and a bit of that. I would want them to go to a specialist unit. There is an argument for the concentration of specialist services in centres of excellence.
There is also much merit in Lord Darzi’s proposals for local elective centres. At the end of the day, Queen Mary’s might become a centre of excellence, dealing with very real needs in the community—hips, knees, hernias, routine gynaecology and cataracts. That would not be a downgrading of the hospital, as long as it continued to provide 24-hour emergency care for people who are not blue-light emergency cases. It would be providing a vital service.
However, all such discussion is premature, because we have not yet had the debate about Darzi and what kind of health service we want for the next five or 10 years. I want an assurance from the Minister that we will not be reduced to only two hospitals serving our area—that there will continue to be four hospitals, and that the decisions will be about what services are provided at which hospital, and which services might be more effectively provided in the community.
I say this to the Minister: if the proposed changes are patient-driven and can be proved to be safer and more effective and have better outcomes for my constituents, my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) and I shall support the Government. However, if we are not convinced that they are safer and offer better outcomes for our constituents, and we think that they are financially driven, we will join Opposition Members in opposing the proposals.
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