Dan Jarvis: Health reforms alienate heroes of the NHS

In the last year, I have spent long nights at my late wife’s bedside as she battled against cancer.

I am reminded of Andrew Agombar, the consultant surgeon who twice operated on my late wife, and of his relentless commitment to trying to save her and to serving the public.

I am reminded of the conversations I have had in Barnsley Hospital with doctors and nurses.

I am reminded of the GPs who provide an integral part of the British way of life and I am reminded of the porters, cleaners and volunteers. They are all heroes and are all dedicated to the very best principles of our NHS.

In my family’s darkest days, we saw the true genius of the NHS – a genius based on care and compassion, commitment and dedication, principles and standards.

The market can be a useful tool, but there are limits to its ability to deliver those values. There is a reason why Bupa does not do accident and emergency, and we must never allow an ideological free-market agenda to undermine all that is great about the NHS. That is what the Government are in danger of doing.

I accept the need for fiscal responsibility and I acknowledge that the Secretary of State’s proposals have the purpose of moving health care more into the community and away from hospitals, but the patient, not the market, must always come first.

The risk is that the British people will pay for these reforms three times over while patients see little or no improvement in their care.

The previous Labour Government delivered the biggest hospital-building programme in NHS history based on Private Finance Initiative funding, which the then Opposition supported.

Consequently, many trusts are now locked into 20-to-30-year fiscal plans. In order to realise the benefits of the investment that Labour put into the NHS, those trusts will require stable funding over this period. Without it, much of the existing investment could be wasted.

GP commissioning is another example of the Bill’s inefficiencies. The taxpayer could end up paying to fund the community or the private investor. Ultimately, it is a matter of priorities. What will be the cost of making NHS staff redundant, before the additional cost of rehiring by the GP commissioning bodies?

To me, none of this makes sense, and it leads many health officials to question whether the Health Secretary fully understands what impact the reforms will have on the front line morally, economically and logistically, and in this confusion the NHS is placed at risk.

Why not use the facilities that the Labour Government spent £100bn building over the past decade? Would it not be simpler to keep the PCTs?

Surely it makes far more sense to increase GP involvement to allow for clinical oversight. Of course there are problems in the NHS which need solving, but the Government’s plans are not just a misguided attempt at privatisation by stealth; they fail to acknowledge that the past 13 years of reforms ever happened.

As well as issues of cost, the proposed reforms are a threat to the accountability of the NHS – at a local level, with the removal of the non-executive directors, and nationally, with the transfer of responsibility from Whitehall to the NHS board.

How will we know whether we are getting value for money? What impact will the reforms have on local waiting times?

If the Secretary of State genuinely believes in these reforms, what accountability mechanism is he introducing to judge how well they are working?

The Department of Health has not explained how the reforms will address the challenges of longer life expectancy, advances in technology and greater public expectations.

Although I am new to Westminster politics, if MPs and the Secretary of State had such faith in the reforms, it is confusing to me why they were not put in the manifesto and the people of this country given the opportunity to vote on them at the General Election.

GPs will be substituting the calculator for the stethoscope. That is bad for the NHS and bad for patients.

Given how far we have come, would not the first year of Secretary of State Andrew Lansley’s tenure in the Department of Health have been better spent, for example, on a concentrated investment of effort in cancer care? We must fight the war on bureaucracy, but not at the expense of the war on cancer.

Would not the Secretary of State have better spent his time learning from our European partners how to educate people about the dangers of an unhealthy lifestyle – diet, drink and drugs – and their effect, particularly with regard to cancer treatment? We need to address the reasons why a cancer sufferer in Barnsley is less likely to survive than a sufferer in Barnet.

These are the NHS reforms that would make a positive difference and that the country expects us to deliver.

Instead, the scale and pace of the Government’s cuts are making it virtually impossible for Barnsley Hospital to plan ahead. Budgets are being cut while patient numbers are going up.

We all deserve better.

Dan Jarvis is the Labour MP for Barnsley Central. This is an edited extract of a speech that he delivered in Parliament on the Government’s Nhs reforms.