Maternity Services (Morecambe Bay) — House of Commons, 2015-03-03
Topic: Health
Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his measured tone. I am sure he is absolutely sincere in wanting to learn from this tragedy. I thank him for his moving words and for his apology. He will understand that there is nervousness among the families because, in the past, when the Government have talked about rooting out poor care, we have been accused of running down the NHS. We have had a different tone today, and I welcome it To answer the right hon. Gentleman’s specific points on the quality of care at the hospital currently, the best person and people to make that judgment are the new CQC and chief inspector of hospitals, Professor Sir Mike Richards. He has said that, in his view, the care at the maternity unity in Furness general hospital is good, and indeed safe—it is more than safe; it is good. That should reassure many people who are using the hospital. He is also very clear that there are many, many improvements to make, and his overall rating for the trust is not good. The report highlights many areas that still need to be addressed, but it is important to give that reassurance On death certification, I assure the right hon. Gentleman that we fully support that policy. As he knows, it was recommended in January 2005, so it has taken a long time for both Governments to address. We fully support the policy and have had successful trials. We are committed to introducing it as soon as possible and we want to go further. There may be some common ground, because we, too, have been talking to Professor Nick Black about case note reviews. The latest advice I have had is that it would be technically very difficult to review the case notes of all the 250,000 deaths every year in NHS hospitals, because of the resource implications and the doctors’ time it would take. I asked whether it would be possible to do that. I was advised that, if we looked at case notes hospital by hospital, there would be a risk of trusts getting into big disputes about whether or not a death was avoidable. I asked Professor Black to help me to devise a methodology so that we can assess the level of avoidable deaths by hospital trust. We would be the first health economy in the world to do that. I hope we will have his full support as we take that forward On the decision to give the trust foundation trust status, the report makes it clear that Ministers were advised that they had no locus to intervene, because the process had already been set in train—the decision had been deferred but not stopped, so they were not able to intervene. It is clear that the level of knowledge in the Department of Health, as in the rest of the system, was wholly inadequate given what was happening in that hospital I should like to make one other point, on a comment made by Labour this morning that the report would say that the failings were very localised. In fact, the report says the opposite. I want to read what Dr Kirkup says in the introduction to the report: "It is vital that the lessons, now plain to see, are learnt and acted upon, not least by other Trusts, which must not believe that ‘it could not happen here’." It is important that we take that lesson from the report extremely seriously I would like to finish on a note of consensus. I appreciate that it is not always easy for Oppositions to support the Government publicly as they put right policy mistakes that they have inherited, but I think there is one thing where we can make common ground: the need for culture change in the NHS. Policies can be changed over one Parliament, but culture change takes a generation. What the families who have suffered so much want to know more than anything else is that Members on all sides of the House are committed to that, so that we never again go back to the closed ranks and institutional self-defence that piled agony on to their tragedies, and that, once and for all, we all make the commitment that patients will always come first.