WARRINGTON’S two MPs found themselves both hitting out on the same issue during a House of Commons adjournment debate on the controversial proposals to remove vascular services from Warrington Hospital.
Predictably, they approached the issue from different standpoints – but Labour’s Helen Jones condemned the proposals as “fatally flawed” while Conservative David Mowat described them as “piecemeal.”Both appeared to fear that the loss of vascular services at Warrington could lead to the loss of other services in the town.
Ms Jones, MP for Warrington North, urged the Health Minister to review the proposals and take action before other health services in Warrington were damaged.
She said the review of vascular services conducted by the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside, which move the service from Warrington to Chester, had “no proper evidence base” and was fatally flawed.
Ms Jones said: “This is a shabby little stitch-up that cannot go unchallenged. If the Minister wants to champion local decision making, it is his duty to ensure that those decisions are properly based on evidence and are reached through due process. That has not been the case here.”
She said during the bidding process the review panel allowed Liverpool and Chester to take away their submissions and rewrite them from June to October. It did not allow the same leeway to Warrington and Halton NHS Trust who, after protests from overview and scrutiny committees, were allowed only seven days.
The decision would undermine existing stroke services and make it very difficult for Warrington to secure hyper-acute stroke units and trauma centres.
Ms Jones highlighted concerns expressed by the North West Ambulance Service who drew attention to the fact that Warrington was uniquely prone to gridlock, because of accidents on the motorway system.
The response from the NHS panel was, she said, that gridlock was “challenging”.
Ms Jones retorted: “Not being able to get an ambulance through is not challenging – it is life-threatening.”
She added: “I will support changes in services where they can be shown to improve patient care. I cannot support them where there is no evidence that they will improve patient care and there is a lot of evidence that they will damage patient care in other specialities.”
She said the Minister had to act before other services in Warrington were damaged.
Mr Mowat was also concerned about the removal of vascular services from Warrington Hospital.
The Warrington South MP said: “This review seems to have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion which is a cause for concern.
“If every centralisation decision is taken in this piecemeal way, Warrington and Halton hospitals might well lose out every single time.
“When decisions on centralisation are made, there needs to be some kind of strategy for deciding what will end up where, so that every decision is not made on a piecemeal basis.
“As a result of Labour’s botched PFI contract, we have a financial black hole just up the road at Whiston which could suck patients away from Warrington.
“With specialist vascular services now being moved elsewhere too, there is a real danger that this could have a detrimental effect, not just on the services provided for people in Warrington, but also on the future finances of our hospital.”
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“As a result of Labour’s botched PFI contract, we have a financial black hole just up the road at Whiston which could suck patients away from Warrington.”
Last monday’s Panorama made clear that this government, far from stopping the ‘botched PFIs’ has indulged in an orgy of new PFI contracts. So please, Mr Mowat, stop turning everything into a partisan statement. It is not constructive.
When talking about Labour’s botched PFI schemes, David Mowat should not forget PFI was a Conservative conceived process, to which Gordon Brown added the Enron style off balance sheet method of bean counting. So making an inherently flawed process worse in accountancy terms. PFI should never have seen the light of day logically, that is why in England the financial details of PFI schemes are secret. Scotland is more open about the information. So there is an element of shared political responsibility over the introduction of this accountancy sleight of hand, which fools no one with any economic sense. Both Osborne and Clegg, when in opposition, heaped scorn and derision on PFI, now they are committed enthusiasts.