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Family Doctor Services

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making the pertinent point, alluding to his constituency, that where we trust NHS professionals and give them authority, autonomy and budgets, they will work for their benefit and the benefit of patients and the whole community. We can see an example of that co-operative work in the primary care sector in Cheshire, particularly in Macclesfield. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his role in producing that outcome. As of March 2009, a polyclinic or health centre, or whatever it is to be called, will be foisted on my constituents in Peterborough, with only partial lip service to democracy—the gloss of democracy—via the city council health overview and scrutiny committee. What is the strange beast that will be foisted on us? Open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, it will apparently provide a one-stop, multidisciplinary medical assessment, diagnosis and treatment facility, supposedly located in a deprived area of the city. All fine and dandy in principle, but what does one-stop medicine actually mean? Where will the doctors to staff the polyclinic come from? No established doctor who has his or her own family practice will want to give it up to work at a polyclinic. Does that mean that less experienced and capable staff will be recruited? I hope not. When we board an aeroplane we hope it will be flown by a pilot, not an air stewardess. I hope that when my constituents go to a polyclinic they will receive the highest possible standard of primary care from clinicians and NHS professionals. We have already seen shortages across the country—for example, of fully trained radiographers, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries) said, specialist nurses and hospital doctors. What about X-rays, scans and blood tests? Will there be consultants on site to oversee such work? If so, who will cover their work at Peterborough district hospital and Edith Cavell hospital? What are the resource implications? Will polyclinics deal only with straightforward cases, such as the young, the wealthy and the only occasionally poorly—Tarquin and Jocasta popping down in their 4x4 before they go off on a business trip? Will polyclinics treat only the so-called worrying well? That may be the case. What about the very old, the poor and people with chronic conditions, such as chronic mental health issues? Will they be welcome at the polyclinic? I am not entirely convinced. What will be the future of the family doctor service in my constituency? Will those services go the way of local shops and pharmacies? Mention was made earlier of the impact of the 2005 regulations on small pharmacies, which are closing at an alarming rate, giving way to the provision of pharmaceutical services in large supermarkets such as Sainsbury's and Asda. Will those services go the way of NHS dental surgeries and of post offices? We know of the Government's lamentable record of duplicity about post office closures over a number of months and years. The Department of Health has promised more money for polyclinics, but will it be from existing, struggling NHS local budgets? I beg the indulgence of the House while I make my next point—one with which my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds) will have some sympathy. We have had a huge influx of EU migration in Peterborough that has put massive strain on surgeries across the city, notably the surgery of Drs. Modha and Modha at Thistlemoor road, New England, and Dr. Prasad's surgery at the Westwood clinic. They are straining under the weight of inward migration from the EU. Will that be taken into account in the national template forced on local PCTs? No one in Peterborough has voted to end the relationship between patients and their local, trusted and—mostly—friendly general practitioners for the sake of those super-surgeries. We should be opening more family practitioner surgeries in the poorest areas of my constituency. We should not be centralising and putting everything in one place—a place that people who have travel and transportation problems as a result of their illnesses and medical conditions may find it difficult to reach. As always happens under this Government, there will probably end up being a great fanfare and lots of money spent, but at the end of the day there will be depersonalised services, dumbed-down care and a system without comprehensive budgeting, risk assessment or proper consultation.