Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2015-02-24
Topic: Health
Questions: Not enough GPs want to practise in rural Wales. I am told that one of the reasons is that GPs registered in England have to go through a bureaucratic process to be able to work in Wales. Will my hon. Friend the Minister work with the Welsh Government to ensure that we have a common registration process so that GPs can move between England and Wales without having lengthy, time-wasting new bureaucracy?; A recent Ashcroft poll shows that only 15% of the public think that this Government have the best approach to running the NHS. Will the Secretary of State stand up at the Dispatch Box and apologise for his top-down reorganisation of the NHS and his Tory privatising Health and Social Care Act, and accept that the public will never trust the Tories with the NHS?; I have previously made Ministers aware that there are no beds for females in Dorset who need intensive psychiatric care. Our local newspaper, the Daily Echo, reports that such places will not be provided in Dorset for another three years. Meanwhile, patients are being sent as far away as Bradford. Do Ministers regard that as satisfactory? Are there enough resources coming to Dorset, or is it a local organisational issue?; Bolton’s accident and emergency department has been in crisis recently, partly because the clinical commissioning group closed the town’s walk-in centre. Will the Secretary of State support my petition calling for its reinstatement, or will he say, more predictably, “It’s not me, guv; I’m just the Secretary of State for Health”?; My constituent Wilma Ord was prescribed Primodos in the 1970s, an oral hormone pregnancy testing pill that she blames for her daughter’s birth defects. As the Secretary of State is aware, it was announced back in October that an inquiry would be established to look into the whole issue. What progress has been made in setting up the inquiry and what assurances can he give my constituent, and the many other women and families affected throughout the country, that the inquiry will be fully comprehensive, transparent and independent?; When I asked the Minister last June what guarantees he would give to GP practices at risk because of the withdrawal of the minimum practice income guarantee, I was told that NHS England would ensure threatened practices “get to the right place.”—[Official Report, 10 June 2014; Vol. 582, c. 400.]Over the past seven months, those discussions have not alleviated the threat to two highly regarded practices in my constituency that face closure. Will the Minister agree to meet me and representatives of the practices to discuss what is really happening, and to consider what can be done to save them?
Adrian Mark Sanders (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): In order to combat fraud, the previous Government quite rightly introduced five-year prescription charge exemption certificates. Now that the certificates are coming up for renewal, people are finding that they have to pay for their medicines once their certificate has expired, and they have even been fined. Unlike for a TV licence, there is no renewal reminder. Will the Government look at how to ensure that people are told they need to renew their prescription exemption certificates?