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NHS Staffing

On behalf of everybody present, and indeed on your behalf, Madam Deputy Speaker, and the behalf of every Member, may I pay tribute to the wonderful work done by doctors, consultants and nurses, and the ancillary workers who are often the unsung heroes of the NHS? As the hon. Member for Leeds, North-West (Greg Mulholland) says, there are tensions within the NHS. It is therefore simply beyond belief that not one Labour Member of Parliament intends to speak in this debate on NHS staffing. I hope that when the Minister makes her final comments, she will apologise for that, as it sends out a curious message to all those in the NHS who are under considerable stress. In recent years, the NHS has faced a number of problems, not least in Suffolk. The county has been hit by cash crises, service cuts, closures and redundancies. Our hospitals are continually on black alert. In the past 10 years, the number of available beds has been cut from 1,501 in 1996-07 to 1,194 in 2006-07. What is really sad is that community nurses and doctors have told me that the local hospital, the West Suffolk hospital, is being forced to discharge patients prematurely. Of course, the hospital is doing everything in its power to mitigate those unfortunate circumstances, but the situation has arisen because of very tight finances. The problem is that there are insufficient numbers of intermediate care beds, ever-increasing pressures on staff, and a top-down, centralised, target-driven culture that continues to drive front-line clinicians in our NHS to despair. That is well known.