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Health and Education

I should like to start by making it clear that I pay tribute to members of the NHS—doctors, nurses and any other staff working in the service—and that none of my words imply any impact on them or criticism of them. I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will see what I am alluding to. I particularly want to pay tribute to John Goulston, the chief executive of Barking, Havering and Redbridge Hospitals NHS Trust, for the work that he is doing in trying to turn the trust round, following its previous abysmal administration, about which I shall say more in a moment. First, I want to talk about the amount being paid out in claims for negligence in the NHS. In my own trust, in the past four years, £33,534,380 has been paid out. That represents 179 claims. There are still 180 claims outstanding, so the final amount could be tens of millions of pounds more. My distress is compounded when I think that across London, £250 million has been paid out in the past three years. I thank the Secretary of State for meeting me to discuss the problem, and for his awareness of how to address it. I shall refer to two cases, which I will simply call A and B, in order to leave the people anonymous. One lady went for a kneecap replacement, but it is was put in the wrong way round, as she realised when she was unable to walk. Not only did she receive compensation, but the operation—with all its associated costs—had to be redone. More tragically, case B concerns a lady in perfect health who went into hospital to have a baby, but something went wrong and she was left paralysed, brain-damaged and in a very distressing state—with multi-payouts of moneys following on. My point is not to apportion blame, but to say that we must look more deeply into how such events are happening and why. Perhaps retraining through the General Medical Council is necessary, but we must stop this happening in the future. For example, my own area's NHS trust has a deficit of some £90 million—and the vast bulk of it is due to cases such as those two. The General Medical Council investigates the doctors involved in such cases. The problem is that that is not happening quickly enough: many of these cases drag on and on for years, yet while they are being investigated the doctors continue to operate on patients. I hope that the Secretary of State agrees—in fact, I know from the words he kindly exchanged with me the other day that he does—that patients have the right to know if a doctor who is operating on them is being investigated as a result of a serious complaint connected with another case. I hope that some measures in the Queen's Speech will provide some assistance with such problems. I mentioned earlier the previous administration of my area's trust, which brings me to another point that I have previously raised with Ministers and the Secretary of State. A former chief executive—in this case I will provide the name: Mark Reece, whom I have named here before—left the trust in a bad position, with vast debts, yet received quite a sum of money as a payoff, and, indeed, for his pension. Once such payments have been made by the NHS, we must ensure that the people concerned cannot be re-employed as consultants elsewhere in the country and earn even more money from the NHS. That is simply rewarding failure, and it has to be stopped. I say that because this gentleman—together with his partner, a former chief executive of Maidstone and West Kent NHS Trust, who also had a payoff—has indeed formed a consultancy with the hope of advising the NHS on how to run trusts up and down the country. I would say that those two people are not the right ones to be advising the NHS on anything anywhere in our country. Together with my colleague the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes), I recently visited the maternity wing of the Queen's hospital, Romford, and I can only pay tribute to the work being done there. I say this in a completely non-political way, but I think that the Government have a facility there that they have done proud, as the services that constituents receive there are first class. But—I am sorry that there has to be a but—it can take up to one and a half hours for my constituents in Ilford, North to get there by two bus journeys. Today I received a complaint from a constituent about how long it can take to get there. Although that is a great facility, we must also enhance and improve the King George hospital, which also services my constituency, to ensure that my constituents can receive services as close to their own doorsteps as possible. We heard earlier from the Secretary of State about the services of polyclinics, and I believe that the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) paid tribute to one that opened recently in his constituency. One is opening in my neighbouring constituency, and I welcome anything that enhances services to patients. However, it will not help my constituents, so I very much hope that all GP services are protected, with no closures whatever, so that people can get the service they deserve as close as humanly possible to their own doorsteps.