Diana Johnson: The symptoms of a fragmented NHS

In the past two years, however, especially since the wasteful £3bn top-down NHS reorganisation, which nobody voted for and for which there was no call in the Coalition Agreement, things have deteriorated.

I worry that the only person who seems to understand or know how the fragmented NHS now operates and fits together is the former Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, and I note that he is leaving the House of Commons at the next election.

The number of complaints I have received from my constituents about the NHS has doubled in the past year, going from 16 to 34 in 2012-13. This year, I have already received 27 such complaints.

It has been reported that almost 4,000 patients in East Yorkshire are now forced to wait more than 18 weeks to see a hospital consultant. The areas in which they have to wait are orthopaedics, neurology and colorectal and thoracic medicine. It is a concern that ill people have to wait to be seen.

I have also had complaints about A&E and the acute assessment unit at Hull Royal infirmary. The complaints are often about waiting times to be seen by doctors. Many people say that they think the staff are doing a good job, but are overstretched.

A constituent sent me an email in which she said: “My husband was admitted to Hull Royal Infirmary on New Year’s Day with a major asthma attack due to a viral chest infection. He received excellent care by the staff both in the ambulance and those on duty. However, the overcrowding in A&E gives serious cause for concern. Many dozens of poorly people were waiting on trolleys in the corridors. The staff were run ragged.”

She said that her husband had to wait 11 hours to get the results of an X-ray and blood test. She went on to say: “If A&E is the barometer of the Health Service then it is sadly in trouble. The NHS had improved so much under Labour.”

Let me read out another case that was sent to me by my caseworker: “The constituent’s father had been unwell for over a year. He was admitted to Hull Royal Infirmary… where he was on the Acute Assessment Unit Ward with suspected tuberculosis. When the constituent visited him the next day, they found that: the drip in his arm had not been put into a vein; he had been laid in his own urine; there was no way for him to attract the nurse’s attention; and nobody had checked on him for six hours.

“He was discharged the following Tuesday, however he was still poorly and had difficulty walking. He still had a cannula in his arm. The constituent had to go back to the hospital to collect his medication, and she found out that the nursing staff didn’t know why he had been discharged. The constituent said she was later told by a nurse and her family’s GP that he had been sent home to die.”

Those are just two examples from my growing postbag. Admittedly, not all the problems with Hull’s NHS as reported in our recent Care Quality Commission report, such as the totally unacceptable bullying culture, may be entirely made in Whitehall. However, these problems seem to have come to the fore in the past two years after the NHS reorganisation.

There is another related matter that I want to raise. The former chief executive of Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, Phil Morley, suddenly resigned just before the publication of a very poor CQC report, which highlighted the bullying culture in the Trust.

I was shocked to read, just a few weeks later, that he has now resurfaced as the new chief executive in Harlow, Essex. I thought that the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was going to end this revolving door of chief executives moving from trust to trust, but he has not, and I am very anxious that we should deal with the matter.

The NHS is a key issue for many of my constituents. I will be out and about over the summer listening to their concerns about the NHS and about what is going on locally. I remember very clearly the Prime Minister saying in 2010 that the NHS was safe in his hands. Four years on, I do not particularly think that he has kept that promise, and I think that over the coming 12 months we will start to see more 
and more issues raised about the state 
of the NHS.

Diana Johnson is the Labour MP for Hull North who spoke in a Commons debate.