Hospitals
Freddie van Mierlo Excerpts(1 week, 4 days ago)
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Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)
Hospitals matter to everyone, but hospitals falling apart help no one—not patients, not staff and not the economy. The Government have called the NHS “broken”. They rightly blamed the Conservatives, and criticised the NHS’s management under their leadership, so why are the Government now making the same mistakes?
Under the revised new hospital programme, the building of the Royal Berkshire hospital will not commence for another decade. There is little prospect of a new Royal Berkshire to serve the communities of Henley, Reading, Newbury, Bracknell and Windsor until the 2040s. Doctors who have worked in the NHS for over 30 years believe that they will never work in modern buildings. The cancer centre alone is 164 years old.
Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)
My hon. Friend talks of members of staff with long service. A former nurse with 40 years’ experience in the NHS recently contacted me. She took her husband, who has complex needs, into hospital, as he had a hand infection, and they were forced to wait for over 12 hours in a tiny cubicle with no ventilation. It pained me to hear that story. She worked so hard for the NHS, which she felt was down on its knees. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is a damning indictment of the state of our hospitals, and that we urgently need to pursue a major 10-year capital investment programme to get them back up to speed?
Freddie van Mierlo
My hon. Friend is right to point out the impact of the state of the NHS on the brilliant people who work there. My sister is a nurse in the Royal Preston hospital, and she tells me just how hard it is to walk past people who are being cared for in corridors. Every week at the Royal Berkshire, an operation is cancelled due to power cuts, water supply issues, broken lifts or malfunctioning temperature controls. Those are lost appointments and lost efficiency for the NHS. Floods and sinkholes plague the foundations of the Royal Berkshire hospital, which now requires relocation, and identified suitable sites are set to be put on the market at the end of this year. Further inaction by the Government will mean that those carefully laid plans and that funding will amount to nothing.
There are also hospitals that were never considered for the programme, as my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) pointed out. I recently visited the Warneford hospital in Oxford, which gives in-patient care to patients with severe mental health conditions, including schizophrenia, personality disorders and psychosis. I was shocked by the conditions that patients live in. They are in tight spaces in dark rooms, and the infrastructure is Georgian. There were rooms that reminded me of recent visits to HMP Huntercombe. I said that rather nervously to the member of staff showing me around, worried that I might offend them. They gently held my arm and said, “Freddie, why do you think we showed you these rooms?”
Staff told me that cramped conditions make it difficult to take breaks during the day. One worker showed me their windowless cupboard office—hardly great for their own mental health. Staff also told me how working in Georgian buildings impacts the quality of their work. Sight lines in common rooms are obstructed by pillars; rooms are difficult to heat; and security is difficult to maintain. A new Warneford would cost a fraction of the price of a physical health hospital, and the Government promised to put mental health on the same footing as physical health, so why does the revised new hospital programme not include a single mental health facility?
Both the Warneford and the Royal Berkshire have been devastated by the Government’s lack of foresight. The cuts to hospital spending are a decision made to save money, but that is a false economy. Over the next 10 years, repairs to the Royal Berkshire hospital are projected to cost £400 million—a quarter of the cost of a new hospital. Add to that the many other neglected hospitals, and the loss is unthinkable. Proper investment in modern infrastructure is needed now.
In my constituency we have the Townlands Memorial hospital, which shows how good the NHS can be with modern infrastructure. Anyone who receives care there, whether through the Royal Berkshire NHS foundation trust or the Oxford Health NHS foundation trust, sings its praises. It hosts over 30 specialities and plans to expand further. Let us give our hospitals the chance to excel.
Several hon. Members rose—
National Cancer Plan
Freddie van Mierlo Excerpts(3 months ago)
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Andrew Gwynne
I cannot even begin to think what it would be like to lose a child full stop, but to lose them to cancer would be horrific for their parents. I pay tribute to Lorraine for all the campaigning she has done on this. I am more than happy to meet my hon. Friend and Lorraine to talk about this, but the whole reason for putting the taskforce back on an operational footing is so that we can make the changes that she and Lorraine want to see.
Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)
Members across the House will be all too familiar with constituents reaching out to let them know that safe, effective new medicines are not approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. The Minister speaks of research and the need for access. Will he commit to being a critical friend of NICE, to ensure both good value for the taxpayer and good access for patients?
Andrew Gwynne
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. NICE is there for a particular reason: to ensure that the drugs being developed are available on the NHS when they meet the required threshold. Of course, we want to ensure that as new treatments become available, they are available for British patients. The work that is being done with Moderna and other pharmaceutical companies will ensure that British patients have access to some of the latest treatments as they come through the pipeline.
Access to Primary Healthcare
Freddie van Mierlo Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)
I very much welcome this debate. GPs are rightly pillars of our community—doctor remains one of the most trusted professions, perhaps unlike ours—but I want to mention some of the other key professions in the primary care sector, including practice nurses, who dedicate their lives to working on behalf of our residents.
Right now, practice nurses are working hard to deliver flu, covid, RSV and shingles jabs to many of our residents. They are the unsung heroes who keep primary care going, but their number is declining due to wage constriction. New nurses looking to boost their salaries often opt for hospital-based care because they can improve their pay packet with unsocial hours payments. Mental health nurses, healthcare assistants and social prescribers also provide essential services, and we must not forget receptionists, who bear much of the public’s frustration after 14 years of failed government. They have my thanks.
GPs are in crisis. The Tories let waiting times soar and failed to deliver a new framework contract for GPs in time, leading to industrial action. I am very concerned that in my area we have sleep-walked into a two-tier health system, with long waits for those who cannot afford private care and access for those who can. In Henley, we are seeing the first fully private GP practices and many people going for jobs with corporate insurance plans. There are now routinely four-week waits in places such as Thame, Benson, Watlington and Chalgrove, where we have seen significant housing growth. As my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) mentioned, developer funds have been collected, but in Oxfordshire they are not being released in time to deliver the infrastructure that is needed.
I want to highlight the impact of those waits on some of the most vulnerable people. I recently spoke to my constituent Suzannah Windsburrow, a tenacious campaigner with learning difficulties, who highlighted to me just how important timely access to healthcare is for her. The collective impacts of a lack of access mean that people with learning disabilities die earlier than those without one—23 years earlier for men and 27 years earlier for women.
I very much welcome the Liberal Democrat commitments on health, and I encourage the Labour party to copy our manifesto—honestly, we won’t mind—including our commitments to ensuring that people can see a GP within seven days or, if it is urgent, 24 hours; to 8,000 more GPs; and to providing a named GP for people over 70. I also hope that Labour will copy our very important policy on delivering mental health professionals in schools.