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Health and Education

Well, we have the advantage of having my parents-in-law to help look after the baby. But there are a lot of teenage mothers in other parts of Shropshire, particularly in Telford, who do not have such family support. They are very young and inexperienced, do not know how to look after a baby and have nobody to help them. Throwing them out of our hospitals just to make way is wrong. I do not normally get emotional, but that is very wrong, and I want to put it on the record. The deficit is so bad that my nurses have been told this week that they will have to pay £90 a year to park their cars in the Royal Shrewsbury hospital car park. How on earth are those nurses, who earn so little money anyway, going to afford that? Nevertheless, they are going to be forced to cough up £90 just to park their car. It is an absolute scandal. In fact, many of my constituents have written to me asking me to try to stop car-parking charges at the Royal Shrewsbury hospital. Every time that they visit an elderly relative, for example, they have to pay. Indeed, I myself nearly got a parking fine. The tickets run out at midnight, so those whose wives are giving birth late at night are expected to leave them while giving birth, and to run down to the car park to buy a new ticket. It is absolute madness. There has been little discussion so far about dentistry. There is a terrible shortage of NHS dentists, and I am disappointed that there is nothing in the Queen’s Speech about what the Government intend to do to improve NHS dentistry and to increase the availability of this vital service. The other day at my surgery I met a very senior local dentist who has set up an NHS dental practice in Shrewsbury. He told me that buying all the equipment and so on cost £650,000, and that he had taken out a bank loan. Interestingly, although NHS dentistry is said to be national, the grant from Government was worth only £50,000. The chief executive of our hospital, Mr. Tom Taylor, has a very difficult job. He is an honourable and hard-working man whom I admire, but he is trying to ensure that Shropshire retains two accident and emergency departments—one in my hospital and the other in Telford’s Princess Royal hospital. He is fighting the Government tooth and nail because they want only one such department in Shropshire which, despite its size, has a population of only 500,000. In these difficult financial times, the Government think that that means that we do not deserve or need two accident and emergency departments. Closing one of our departments would be a travesty for the county. Will the Minister give me an assurance that Shropshire will continue to have two accident and emergency departments, and that neither of the existing facilities will be closed in the foreseeable future? The Government do not take into account the rurality of the county. For example, Coventry hospital serves an area of 17 square miles, whereas my hospital serves 172,000 square miles. It is huge area, stretching all the way from Aberystwyth to the Staffordshire border, but the Government take no account of that when providing funding. The Royal Shrewsbury hospital is also engaged in a huge battle over cancer services. We are going through a public consultation process that might mean that we lose our urology services. The Government want to shut down Shropshire’s cancer services and make people go to regional centres such as those at Stoke and Wolverhampton. They want such centres to be situated in areas with populations of more than 2 million people, but that must be wrong. People who live in one of Shropshire’s small rural villages—such as Ploxgreen, Snailbeach or, in the south of the county, Cardington—find that it takes them at least three hours to drive to Stoke. We should bring services closer to people, not move them further away. My local newspaper is the Shrewsbury Chronicle. Today, it highlights a problem centred around the local bed bureau, an agency that for 30 years has liaised with GPs around the county to arrange relevant treatments and provide transport for the people involved. The PCT has decided to scrap the bureau and replace it with two GPs, who will sit in a little room trying to suggest to the county’s doctors alternatives to hospitalisation for patients. That has inflamed the local GPs. They are the experts: they know whether their patients need to be hospitalised, and they are furious. To circumvent the process, they are sending their patients to my hospital’s accident and emergency department. The A and E department at the Royal Shrewsbury hospital is brimful because patients are being sent there who should be going to other, more appropriate, departments. My last point, which strikes a personal note, is not a criticism of the Government—although, my goodness, there is certainly a lot to criticise them about. Recently, I injured myself rather badly while I was chopping down some trees on my farm. A tree fell on my foot and skewered it—going straight through it. I am extremely grateful to the doctor who, with pin-point precision, managed to remove pine needles and other things from my foot, but I needed to use crutches for some time afterwards. Indeed, I was amazed that my hospital managed to find crutches that were big enough for me. When I no longer needed the crutches and asked someone at the hospital about returning them, I was met with surprise. They were extremely grateful that I wanted to return them, but said that most people hang on to their crutches, or pass them to someone else, or even sell them at car boot sales. The Government have a responsibility to ensure that people are made to return such equipment, because the cost to the NHS is staggering. I finish my speech by welcoming my neighbour, the hon. Member for Telford (David Wright), who has just come into the Chamber. He and I are fighting strenuously to preserve good hospital services in Shropshire.