NHS Funding Bill — House of Commons, 2020-01-27
Topic: Health
Christopher John Bryant (Labour, Centre-left): I agree with many of the things that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook) just said, and I congratulate him on his speech. I slightly differ with him on the stewardship of the NHS under the present Prime Minister and the rest of the health team, but I am not going to stray too far into partisan politics because, to be honest, I have a profound worry about the future of the NHS. I think we politicians are sometimes too proud of the NHS. We puff out our chests and say, "What a wonderful nation we are. We have the best NHS in the world," but too often we are not prepared to look at the nitty-gritty of whether we are really delivering for people around the country. I say that equally about Wales, England, Scotland or, for that matter, Northern Ireland Statistics never tell the whole story, but some of them show that we do not have the best NHS in the world. Cancer care has obviously already been referred to several times in the debate, and we have worse outcomes than nearly all the equivalent countries with a free health care system in the world. Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand and Norway produce markedly better survival rates for pancreatic cancer, lung cancer and rectal cancer. Even more markedly, the gap between us and those other countries, although we are improving, is not getting any smaller. Our complacency about the NHS is sometimes our biggest downfall There are all sorts of reasons why our cancer survival rates are not as good as they might be. Sometimes patients do not present early enough, for example. We in the UK, men in particular, are worse at presenting. In working-class areas, such as my constituency, men are much more reluctant to take things to their GP that others might immediately spot as being potential cancer symptoms. Likewise, GPs in many parts of the country are too reluctant to send people on for tests when they would have been sent for further examinations in other parts of the country or in other countries This country has half the number of MRI scanners per 100,000 people compared with all the comparators everywhere else in the world. It has already been mentioned that we need more radiologists, but we need more MRI scanners and other equipment, too. Wales has only one PET scanner, but if we were measuring ourselves against other countries, we would probably have seven or eight. We also have a shortage of radiologists. I said to the Secretary of State earlier that the Royal College of Radiologists reckons that we will need an extra 2,000 radiologists by 2023 just to cope with the demand that we currently know about. At this instant, there are more than 1,000 vacancies for consultant radiologists in England alone, meaning that people are being seen later than they need to be, scans are taking longer, people are getting their results later, and it is more difficult to provide treatment on time Three fifths—60%—of consultant radiologist vacancies in England have been vacant for more than a year. That also applies to histopathologists—the people who cut up the biopsy to check whether cancer is present—and only 3% of pathology labs in England reckon that they have enough staff at the moment, with 45% of them are relying on locums and agency staff. That, in the end, is neither good practice nor economically sustainable, because it is more expensive for the NHS. The figures can be replicated in so many other areas. There is a 10% shortage in consultant psychiatrists. One in six eating disorder posts are vacant across the UK—one in three in England—one in eight CAMHS consultant vacancies have existed for more than a year, and 25% of perinatal psychiatric posts in the west midlands are vacant as I speak The same situation applies to A&E. We simply do not have enough A&E consultants, and we are short of 1,500 across the whole UK. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine reckons that hospitals need to double their number of emergency consultants in the next few years, which means increasing the number of training places to at least 425. The Government have no plan to get anywhere near there at the moment All this has an impact on constituencies such as mine, even though it is in Wales, because we do not have enough A&E consultants. We should have roughly one for every 4,000 admittances. England is getting along with something like one for every 10,000 admittances. Some 180,000 people go to the three A&Es that are close to my constituency in Wales, so that should mean 45 consultants, but we have 10 and a half. In my local hospital, the Royal Glamorgan, there is one consultant, and he is leaving at the end of March, which means that our local A&E will be completely unsustainable The plans that the South Wales programme came up with in 2014 are undeliverable. We are going to end up with the most-used A&E on my patch, which sees 65,000 admittances every year, closing simply because there are no staff to staff it. It is not because there is no money, but because there are no staff. My patch has some of the worst levels of deprivation across the whole UK and some of the worst levels of health need in the whole of Europe, with high levels of ischaemic heart disease, high levels of diabetes, and poor health in every regard—every single measure of the health need that one can imagine. On top of that, we have the lowest number of people who have cars and are able to transport themselves to an A&E and mountains that are impassable in the winter. All that is going to make for an impossible situation for my constituents if the A&E at the Royal Glamorgan closes I am not laying blame anywhere. All I am saying is that we have to believe more in our national health service so that more people want to work as radiologists, pathologists or receptionists—the receptionist is sometimes the most important person in the cancer clinic, because they make sure everyone calms down and gets to their appointment when they are needed so that no time is wasted, and all the rest of it. We need to believe far more in our NHS if we are really to transform it in the years to come.