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Emergency Care

May I add my praise and admiration for the dedication, professionalism and sheer hard graft of all those in the emergency services, who do so much to help so many of us? In particular, I should like to praise my local hospital, Leighton hospital, and to thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) for mentioning the great work that it does. Its staff often work in difficult, traumatic and treacherous circumstances, and they deserve the highest praise that we can give them. The Secretary of State mentioned the capacity of our A and E units to cope with the demand, particularly over the Christmas and new year period. He talked about shutdowns, during the 1980s and 1990s, in A and E departments that could not cope with the demand, and said that that was a thing of the past. Sadly, however, Leighton hospital had to close for six hours over Christmas because it could not cope with the demand coming through its doors, despite the long hours and hard work put in by the staff. We have to recognise the fact that that problem is still out there, and work even harder to ensure that we have the capacity to cope with such demand at any time of the year, including the Christmas period. In this important debate, I particularly want to highlight the often unrecognised, unsung work of our community first responders. We must remember that they are volunteers who give up their own time and money to care for people in our local communities, who rely on them not only to respond to tragic accidents but to save lives. They perform a vital, life-saving service in Crewe and Nantwich, and that is recognised by, and embedded in, the local community. I have had the privilege of meeting a number of community first responders, not only in my own constituency but across Cheshire. It is clear that they are extremely highly regarded, not only by local residents but by the local councils, by the control centre staff with whom they deal directly, and by the paramedics on the ground, who appreciate the great work that they do. Unless we have full paramedic coverage and a blanket of defibrillators across an entire area, community first responders will have a role to play in ensuring that they are available to support their local community wherever their care and professional ability are needed. Community first responders are a key component in relation to the response times to emergency calls. Unfortunately, the response times in Cheshire have historically been unsatisfactory. Indeed, last year, the North West Ambulance Service fell almost 20 per cent. below its target for reaching calls to life-threatening cases within eight minutes. As many Members will know, the sooner a response can be made, the better chance there is of survival for that patient. Every second is critical when a life is under threat. Other Members have highlighted the fact that local ambulance trusts are able to hide behind their regional statistics on response times. Those statistics often mask great deficiencies in the local response times throughout the area. We have already heard about one area of the country in which the local ambulance trust has failed to respond to all category A calls with the target eight-minute period. Indeed, that also applies in the Audlem area in my own constituency, where 100 per cent. of the category A calls were not reached within eight minutes. That serves only to re-emphasise the importance of the role that the community first responders play in our local communities. I am delighted that, after the three meetings that I have had with the chief executive of the North West Ambulance Service, he and the local primary care trust—and my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O'Brien), who sits on our Front-Bench shadow team—have managed to put together a working group to look at local response times and to encourage the ambulance service and the community first responders to work together, to ensure that whenever there are professional, qualified community first responders available, they are called on, so that everyone in the local community has the best chance of getting a response as soon as possible.