Kent & Canterbury Hospital — House of Commons, 2017-06-22
Topic: Health
Philip Martin Dunne (Conservative, Centre-right): One of my ministerial responsibilities is to support the Secretary of State in having an oversight of trusts that are in special measures. The East Kent trust has been in special measures and is currently in financial special measures, so I take a close interest in what is happening in that trust. In view of my hon. Friend’s request and the events that have happened this week, I assure her that I will take a particular interest to ensure that the existing facilities at Ashford and Margate are up to scratch to cope with the increased demand they will undoubtedly have to manage I want to make it clear to the House and to the representatives on both sides who look after constituents in Kent that this issue is about maintaining the supervision of junior medical staff and ensuring that we have safe staffing levels for patients from central Kent; it is not about clinical practice or the competence of the hard-working staff in the hospital. I have been assured that before taking this decision every effort was made to identify appropriate senior staff cover from neighbouring trusts. The challenge has been to ensure that an adequate number of consultants were on duty at Kent & Canterbury hospital to allow junior doctors to have senior colleagues to refer to in the event of issues they felt uncomfortable dealing with. The problem that the trust has had is that it has been over-reliant on locum consultant cover in the hospital and there has been an inability to recruit to substantive posts in the hospital over a prolonged period, which has given rise to this concern on the part of HEE and the GMC that the training conditions for junior doctors were not adequate. That is what has led to this decision, rather than any criticism of the individual doctors or other staff members in the hospital I am also assured that the concerns of both HEE and the GMC are being addressed as quickly as possible. That will form part of any public consultation that follows from the development of the STP that is being worked up for the area I will not go into any great detail about the specifics of what has happened over the last few days as my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent has already done so, but our expectation is that this temporary relocation is likely to affect approximately 50 of the 900 patients who visit Kent & Canterbury hospital each and every day. It is important to recognise that there has not been a full A&E unit at Kent & Canterbury hospital since 2005, when services at the trust were reconfigured, and it was established as an emergency care centre. Trauma and general surgical emergency cases had already been sent to sites in Margate and Ashford for some time prior to the recent temporary changes, and I believe it was in 2016 that the emergency care centre itself was turned into an urgent care centre, which again had an impact on services at that time I am advised that local NHS leaders have fully explored the risks of temporarily relocating services and have put in place mitigating action and contingency plans when required. The decision has been an exercise in the balance of risk: it is clearly not desirable, and nor is it either common or unique, for the regulators to take action such as this when they have concerns about both patient and staff safety, and it is not a decision taken lightly or comfortably, but the trust has come to the view that the risk to patient safety outweighed maintaining the status quo and seeking to continue with, frankly, unsustainable levels of senior support. My hon. Friend rightly raised concerns that this might presage a future closure of the site, and I want to try to reassure her: the trust board has been left in no doubt whatsoever that it should not regard this as a step on the road to a permanent solution and that it needs to consider the requirements of the population of mid-Kent in the round when looking at the provision for the future to be undertaken through the STP. The hon. Lady raised a perfectly reasonable concern that the STP horizon of five years is not long enough. If the STP were to consider a more wide-ranging reconfiguration, that absolutely would have to look at the long-term horizon for healthcare provision in the area and not just at meeting the immediate objectives of the next five years.