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Private Sector (NHS)

I shall be referring to that later. It is important that local people have a say in the way in which their health service is run. By way of background to how I got involved in this debate, in February of this year, a women called Pat Hall who lives in Craghead in my constituency came to see me. She explained that she was experiencing a long delay in getting a magnetic resonance imaging scan and was confused as to why she was being sent to the James Cook university hospital in Middlesbrough rather than the University hospital of north Durham, which is very near to where she lives. As most Members would have done, I wrote to the chief executive of the local NHS trust for an explanation. Very helpfully, a few days later, the chief executive, John Saxby of the County Durham and Darlington acute hospitals NHS trust wrote back to me. What he wrote was illuminating. He of course apologised for the delay in Mrs. Hall's scan. He referred to some wider issues that affected not just this case but others in north Durham. Mr. Saxby pointed out that the Department of Health nationally had agreed an initiative which resulted in the commissioning of Alliance Medical Ltd to provide additional scanning services to the NHS. He described how the mobile scanning unit provided by Alliance Medical had arrived at the University hospital of north Durham, only to find that the reinforced parking area required for it was not near enough to the electrical power supply. As a result the scanning unit was moved to Middlesbrough. My constituents had to travel down to Middlesbrough rather than to their local hospital. The distance is about 30 miles. Some might say that that is not very far, but my constituency has very low car ownership. People living in some of the outlying villages might as well be on the moon: 30 miles is a long distance for people with no access to cars. Mr. Saxby described the problems with the contracts he was facing and I will return to that later. I found some of the wider issues he raised absolutely fascinating. I should like to read out some of what he describes as his "quibbles with the contract". He states: "The MRI scanner at University Hospital North Durham is considerably under-employed and has been for some time, and it is the case that had the 'Alliance Medical' money been directed to us at the University Hospital North Durham we would have been able to put on a large number of scanning clinics, which would have almost eliminated in total our waiting times and waiting numbers." He went on to say: "It was a disappointment for us when the Department of Health said that providing individual hospitals with additional resources was not an option, the additional resources had to be made available to the private sector." He concluded: "We are not alone in this as there are a number of hospitals up and down the country, which have spare capacity within their existing scanners." I was concerned, as I am sure other hon. Members would be, by what Mr. Saxby said in his letter. First, there was the shambolic case of Alliance Medical arriving at the hospital and not being able to operate the service because the electricity supply was not laid on, forcing my constituents to travel 30 miles to Middlesbrough. Secondly, and far more seriously, the local NHS trust was seeing money that could have been used to operate an underused scanner diverted to a private company at the expense of the NHS. Finally, this was happening not only in north Durham but throughout the country.