National Health Service — House of Commons, 2015-01-21
Topic: Health
Angela Christine Smith (Labour, Centre-left): I feel privileged to take part in this important debate, which has focused on how the state of the NHS is playing out in Members’ local areas. The contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) encouraged me to reflect on just how recently the NHS was formed. It was launched by Nye Bevan on 5 July 1948, which means that anybody alive today who is in their late 60s or older would have been born before the NHS was created My parents, for instance, were war babies, born well before the NHS was launched. That reflection serves as a reminder not just of how recent the NHS is, but of how easy it might be to let the NHS slip away from our grasp. It is not something that we can take for granted. It is the responsibility of all of us in this place who truly believe in the NHS not only to fight for its survival—that is not good enough—but to see it strengthened and always fit for the challenges of our time. Currently, those challenges are many In an intervention earlier, I referred to the sickness and absence levels beginning to emerge across the country, including in Barnsley, in my constituency, and in Sheffield, and how much that is costing the NHS, but also how much it reflects the problems that the NHS faces I want to focus briefly on ambulance services, because they have not featured very much in today’s debate yet they are a pressing issue in my constituency. I represent an outlying area of South Yorkshire, which extends well into the national park. It is predominantly rural and is suffering from serious problems. I will use two cases to demonstrate the problems that we are facing Mr Offord collapsed on 16 April 2013, at approximately 11 pm. A 999 call was made, but a double-staffed ambulance did not get to Mr Offord until 11.25, by which time he was in respiratory arrest. On being transferred to the floor from the sofa, he was determined to be in cardiac arrest. He died the following day. The coroner ruled that there was a serious lost opportunity in the failure to consider alternative sources of support for a lone paramedic—the first response to the call—and that Mr Offord would probably have survived if he had received medical attention earlier. Mr Offord’s family, obviously very distressed, have settled that case out of court, but they want a wider justice for their son and brother. They want to see ambulance services and response times improved Mr Bailey, who I mentioned in my parliamentary question earlier today, collapsed in a shop. As I said, it took an hour and four minutes—and it was a Red 2 priority call—for an ambulance to get to him, despite the fact that the symptoms described in the emergency call were apparently those of a stroke; indeed, he had suffered a major stroke. This detail is horrific, but I must place it on the record: he had to have part of his skull removed because of the severity of the stroke. In summary, the dispatcher made two errors, which contributed to the delay in an ambulance attending to Mr Bailey, and—these are the words of the Yorkshire ambulance trust itself—"no checks" were "made for an available ambulance from 13:31 until 14:03; and no allocation" was made "of one of the nearer ambulances identified at 14:11." All the ambulance trust has to say is: "Please pass on my sincere apologies to both Mr and Mrs Bailey for the errors and the delay caused."