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Health Care (Sutton)

I have sought this debate on the national health service in the London borough of Sutton in order to put to the Minister a number of questions to which my constituents want answers. I hope that, with the prior agreement of the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) will also be able to address the House during this short debate. What is the future of health care in the London borough of Sutton? What is the future of St. Helier hospital? Those are the questions that my constituents want answered tonight. St. Helier is a huge part of life in Sutton. It is a great white monolith that stands on Rosehill and dominates the south London sky line. It also dominates the lives of my constituents. Like all hospitals, it has formed the backdrop to some of the most significant events in the lives of the people whom it serves—lives begun, lives ended and much else in between. I was born at St. Helier, as were all my children. I therefore make no apology for the personal stake that I hold in the future of my local hospital. Does that hospital have a future? The events of the past six months lead to one conclusion: St. Helier’s future is at risk. We reached that stage through a long and tortuous process of proposals, plans and policies, which amounted to nothing but empty promises. Only 14 months ago, St. Helier was to be the site of a new, high-tech critical care hospital—a state-of-the-art facility at the centre of a network of local care hospitals: a hospital for the 21st century. After years of planning and fruitless consultation, the Secretary of State for Health intervened on 19 December 2005 to direct the local NHS that St. Helier be the site for that hospital of the future. However, rather than actively seeking to implement that direction, local NHS managers attempted to thwart my constituents’ wishes and the Secretary of State’s clear instruction. They have succeeded. Last August, the Secretary of State backed down and withdrew her direction, leaving the NHS, its staff and my constituents in limbo. Why? The answer is money. The trust that runs St. Helier has had to find £20 million in savings in two years. In September, the trust announced the first round of cuts. It called them ““quick wins””—money that could be saved without upsetting anyone: that is, anyone except patients who forgot to pack their pyjamas and found that the hospital no longer kept a stock, those who got fed up with the single limp sandwich that they were served for lunch but were told that hot food was no longer available, or those affected by the jobs that were frozen throughout the trust, causing huge pressure on the wards. However, those cuts were as nothing compared with what came next. On 10 October, the trust announced plans to axe 200 hospital beds—that is, one in four of those available at Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust. A week later, it announced plans to cut 470 jobs—one job in 10 across the trust. Every single one was a front-line clinical job. What impact will the cuts have on the quality of service, staff morale and patient care? Those are questions that my constituents want answered. Between the two announcements, my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington, the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) and I met the Secretary of State for Health. During that meeting, 10 months after her decision to direct that St. Helier be the site of a new critical care hospital, she told us—or at least gave the impression—that there was little chance of that ever becoming a reality. We were told that there was no money behind the lofty aims of the better health care project. Never has it been less gratifying to be proved right. For years my hon. Friend and I have asked the same question: where is the money to pay for the hospital and the network of local care hospitals? That question has been evaded by those in charge of the local NHS. We have had warm words, nudges and winks. They said that everything would be fine, but they never gave a straight answer. Now, years down the line, we are told that there is no money. Where are the people responsible? They are nowhere to be seen. They have gone, moved on or resigned. The disappearing managers and faceless board members promised more and delivered less. Where is the accountability? That is a question that my constituents want answered. We are told that there are too many hospital beds in London and that hospital closures are a real prospect in south-west London. In the end, what have we got? We have a hospital that is falling apart at the seams, where patients recovering from heart surgery shiver because there is no money to fix a broken radiator; a hospital with a threat hanging over it. It is ripe for downgrading—even closure—so that accountants can balance the books in London. How is that better health care, closer to home? It feels like less health care, further from home. On 25 November, on a cold grey morning, in pounding rain, more than 2,000 people joined my hon. Friend and me on a march to protest against the cuts at St. Helier. Those people—ordinary local residents, former patients and disgruntled hospital staff—wanted to send a clear message to the Government, as, indeed, do many Labour Members. They wanted to say no to cuts driven by financial pressure rather than clinical need, no to additional pressures on staff already working extra shifts to offer decent care, and no to the gradual downgrading of services at our hospital. Since then, the situation at St. Helier has deteriorated further. Staff morale has fallen through the floor. With fewer resources, increased pressures and the threat of compulsory redundancies looming, that is hardly a surprise. Morale has been further damaged by the sudden and unexplained resignations of both the chief executive and the chair of the Epsom and St. Helier trust. Morale is only part of the problem, however. The cuts are having an impact on patient care. St. Helier has the trust’s full complement of surgical assessment beds. Those 26 beds are so oversubscribed that, on a single night in December last year, there were 23 breaches of the four-hour waiting time target. That means that 23 people in a single night were let down because the system could not cope. I could go on. I could speak of the nurses who campaigned to have the axing of two special care baby unit beds reversed. I could speak of the specialist nurses who are being forced to reapply for their jobs, competing against people alongside whom they have worked for years, and who are now waiting for their redundancy notices. I could speak of the inevitable increase in emergency readmissions resulting from the aggressive bed-clearing policy. But I must press on. In the midst of this chaos, I am here to ask the Minister to intervene. First, I want a simple assurance that the cuts, the closures and the chaos are not the first stage of a plan to downgrade and eventually close St. Helier hospital. More specifically, I refer the Minister to the ongoing review of the better health care project. The aim of that review is to establish whether the better health care proposals can proceed to the business case stage. The document states that if this is not possible, the requirements of south-west London will"““need to be considered within the overall framework of the proposed Strategy for London””." One of the stated aims of the review is to address the"““financial positions of local commissioners””." It is clear that the health economy in south-west London is already in severe difficulties. It seems that the results of the review are a foregone conclusion. The financial positions of local commissioners lead to just one conclusion: more cuts and closures. Finally, the terms of reference for the review do not provide for direct public consultation.