Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust — House of Commons, 2016-03-21
Topic: Health
Benedict Gummer (Conservative, Centre-right): As a constituency MP, I, too, have been frustrated by consultancy contracts, both before and after the 2010 election. Across the service, we have managed to bear down on consultancy spend considerably. It is for the hon. Lady and her consultants to determine whether the trust has got good value for money. It is not for me to pass comment on that, except for the fact that all hospitals should account to their local people and to the trust and local authority responsible for making sure that money is being spent wisely I completely agree with the hon. Lady in that behind the statistics of poor performance that she identified, there are people who are not receiving the care they require. That was picked up by Professor Sir Mike Richards in his report into the quality of care provided at the hospital. He was very clear about it, saying "we found medical care, end of life services and community inpatients either hadn’t improved or had deteriorated since our last inspection." He found areas of significant staffing shortages affecting patient care, especially on the medical care wards, community in-patient services and in the specialist palliative care team. He said that there was a shortage of medical staff for end of life services. He came to the same conclusion as the hon. Lady did The difference here is that I hope we have made progress since the Mid Staffs tragedy that the hon. Lady identified, and are now able to be more open about this. There will not be a culture of denial from the Government Benches about problems where they exist. Clearly, there is a problem here; it has been identified by the Care Quality Commission. The distressing story of the hon. Lady’s constituent that she raised with the Secretary of State in the Chamber and in the letter and again just now has been supplemented with additional stories that her colleagues have brought to the attention of the Department, and these make it clear that things need to be done in Mid Yorkshire What, then, is the solution to the problems that the hon. Lady has identified? The first is a local one, and all these problems have to be addressed locally, but I of course take the hon. Lady’s point that the Department has to take a degree of responsibility. Of course the Secretary of State and I take responsibility for everything that happens in the health service—that is ultimately our duty—but we cannot micromanage every hospital. It is for the local team to ensure that they are universalising the best and implementing the kinds of changes in their trust that have made such a success of hospitals not very far from the hon. Lady’s own. If they are able to do that, they will already be able to bring considerable improvements to the quality of the care that they can provide I can obviously do additional things as a Minister to give the local team the tools to do the job, as I can for other hospitals across the country. That includes ensuring that they have the best guidance to enable them to roster their staff properly. Lord Carter’s review is being conducted with the Care Quality Commission and with NHS Improvement. It is a tripartite review of safe staffing ratios that will give hospitals cutting-edge support to roster their staff according to the acuity of their patients to ensure maximum safety and efficiency, learning from best practice across the globe. Salford Royal Infirmary has already been looking at this particular model in one guise.