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Health and Education

Next time. There has been almost a clean sweep in the Department for Health, except for Lord Warner in the other place. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton), too, is still here—I beg her pardon; I said almost a clean sweep. It is curious that the Minister in the Lords has become the Minister responsible for NHS delivery. One would have thought that we would have the Minister with that responsibility in this House. It is particularly surprising that it is the Minister who showed a conspicuous failure to act on health care-acquired infections in the course of the last Parliament who is now, ironically, to be in charge of NHS delivery. While I have the chance I also welcome the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) to his responsibilities and, I hope on behalf of the House, thank the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Mr. Burstow) for his contribution in the past. I do not see him at the moment, but I am sure that those thanks will be conveyed to him. He did many services for the House over his years as a health spokesman, not least in identifying the extent of hidden waste in the NHS, which the Government belatedly accepted, and the work that he did on hospital cleanliness, to all of which I pay tribute. The election campaign taught us many things. As one went around the country and visited places such as Dover, for example, one met people in the hospital there providing long-term rehabilitation to people living with head injuries. When we visited Kent county council offices, we could talk to staff who were developing innovative ground-breaking work on tele-medicine initiatives that are about providing not only an alert if elderly people are in trouble at home, but continuous screening and virtual consultations, so that people living with chronic diseases have to spend far less time in consultations with practitioners and, more to the point, are far less likely to be admitted to hospital. As we visited the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital, where Abigail Witchalls is currently being treated, we saw a specialist hospital that is not only providing the finest quality of care, but doing so in old buildings that urgently need renewal—and achieving minimal rates of infection after surgery notwithstanding those difficulties. One could visit community centres, as I did in Crawley, where staff are working to support carers as well as to provide care to service users. In Derby, for example, one could meet enthusiastic staff who are designing and providing a service that is optimised for children and adolescents, and not treating children merely as young adults to be put into national health service hospitals on the same basis as adults. One could also visit Leeds general hospital and meet staff who are initiating new pilot work on the use of primary angioplasty so that instead of patients having thrombolysis when they have a heart attack, they go straight to angioplasty, opening up their arteries so that the long-term outcomes are dramatically better even than with thrombolysis. The pilot project found that a surprisingly large volume of work would have to be done. As we went around the country, the first thing that we discovered—[Interruption.] Notwithstanding the apparent derision of Labour Members, the first thing that we discovered was the first thing that one discovers every time one visits hospitals, GPs and NHS staff—the commitment of those staff. Our first responsibility is to pay the fullest possible tribute to all of them.