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NHS Staffing

Yes, they will. Having sat through the hours of debate on the EU, I was surprised to hear yesterday that the new treaty would give the EU some control over our national health service, the implication being that because ours is not a competitive system like those in the rest of the EU it can interfere with our staffing levels. There was not enough time for the Minister to answer that question, but it is an issue that we need to be concerned about; perhaps we can discuss it in another debate. The Minister kindly mentioned the volunteers in our health service, who do a tremendous amount of work, obviously unpaid, and are an integral part of it. Let me single out one group—Crazy Hats, which is based in my constituency and works to support breast cancer victims. It is a small charity that started from nowhere and has done exceptionally well. It has supported Kettering, Northampton and Leicester hospitals and raised an enormous amount of money. One of its methods is the annual walk round Wicksteed park, which my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr. Hollobone) and I will do in the next couple of weeks. The volunteers in our NHS, as well as the paid staff, do an enormously important job, and they have the gratitude of the whole country. Let me talk about something that I do in my constituency that has a bearing on this subject. My party is very keen on keeping in touch with what people think—it is always having opinion polls and focus groups—so I thought, ““If it's good enough for my party, it's good enough for me and my constituency.”” We run a so-called tracking poll by putting out our ““Listening to Wellingborough and Rushden”” survey all the time in different parts of the constituency. Among other questions, we ask local people what are the issues that really concern them, and the NHS consistently comes up as the second most important issue in the area. When one analyses the sub-questions, one sees that the main issue is the lack of availability of health care and the lack of staff. I want to relate a very distressing story that is worth repeating—I have mentioned it before in the Chamber. It concerns a constituent of mine whose husband was in Northampton general hospital, which is one of the two hospitals that serves my area. He was elderly and quite ill, and unfortunately he was not being fed. Food was being placed at the end of his bed, but he was somewhat blind—that is not very good wording but I think that the Minister will take the point—and had a slight mental problem. In any case, he was a person who needed treatment. The food was put at the end of the bed, but then people came round two hours later and took it away because he was unaware that it was there. When his relatives put a sign above the bed saying, ““My father cannot see the food—could you feed him?”” the answer came back from the poor nurse, ““I'm afraid we do not have time to feed the patients.”” That poor man begged to go home to die at home. He said that it was like being in a hellhole. Unfortunately, he got two hospital-acquired infections, and he did die at home. There is something wrong with a system that allows that to happen. I know that the Government would not want it to happen, but the Minister will know that I am not making it up. The Minister will not be surprised to learn that my area, north Northamptonshire, is the worst funded part of the NHS in the whole country, and the knock-on effects on staffing will be clear to everyone. The Government rightly work out, with considerable time and expense, a national capitation formula to work out how much each primary care trust should have each year to deal with its needs. Unfortunately, that is based on retrospective information, which does not help my constituents in an expanding area. Nevertheless, it would be okay if we received the national capitation formula. As the Minister knows, in each and every year since that formula was brought in, we have not received the full amount. Over the past four years, £120 million has not been provided to my local PCT because, we are told, other areas are overfunded. However, if there is a national capitation formula and that is the minimum amount that should be available in an area, why is my area not getting it? If we had £120 million more in north Northamptonshire, the hospitals there would have more nurses and we would have fewer problems. Staffing levels also have a direct effect on some of the treatments that are allowed in my area—for instance, IVF is not done, or is given a very low priority. I am much more concerned about the condition of wet-eye age-related macular degeneration. In parts of the country, hospitals can treat that condition very easily with injections. A patient would probably need three injections a year, for two or three years. The cost is a mere few thousand pounds. If we had a real national health service, my patients would not have to worry because there would be enough staff to provide those injections. I know that the Minister has been helpful on this matter, and so has the Prime Minister. As far as they possibly can, they have urged the PCT to give those injections. The situation is nonsensical because if people do not have the injections in a short period of time, the staff are not available to give them—