The Daily Echo 23 November 2006

Written by Sandra Gidley and published in The Daily Echo 23 November 2006 on Thu 23rd Nov 2006

I know I frequently write about health but it is my area of responsibility within the party and a subject about which I am passionate. In fact, my disquiet about the Health Service in the early 90s was the start of my party political activism.

I am a member of the Health Select Committee and currently we are investigating the cause, and knock on effects, of NHS deficits. This week was particularly interesting as we were able to question the Secretary of State for Health, Patricia Hewitt.

One of the areas we focussed our questioning on was work force planning and staff redundancies. This area has particular pertinence locally as we have all read the headlines in the local press about job cuts.

The committee's researchers had provided us with figures that showed that NHS staff had increased by over 230,000 in number since the NHS Plan in 2000. Today, many of those people are being made redundant in an attempt to balance the books financially.

I suggested to Patricia Hewitt that staff had been taken on in order to achieve previous political targets, such as reducing waiting times, and now that the target had moved to balancing the books the very staff who had helped achieve Government targets were being made redundant. A slap in the face?

The answer was astonishing. Apparently many trusts had taken on too many staff and this is why the targets had been achieved early! In other words "Don't blame us". This is, at best, disingenuous. Senior managers were likely to lose their jobs if they did not meet the targets of old and did what they could to hit the targets and keep their jobs.

I just had to ask whether Financial Directors were likely to lose their jobs if they did not achieve financial balance. Well, Finance Directors can rest easy because Patricia Hewitt claimed that they were not in the business of making people redundant. This remark attracted the biggest laugh of the day.

A moment of mischief made me ask the Secretary of State whether her job was on the line if the NHS books were not balanced. Astonishingly she said that she had said this would happen and that she would be taking personal responsibility.

Is this the nearest we get to a political yes?

We wait and see but the sting in the tail is that I returned to my laptop to read a letter from a medical technician who had received a "job at risk" letter. His job had nothing to do with achieving targets but has everything to do with maintaining patient safety. The local trust is cash strapped but the bottom line is that short term expediency must not compromise standards or patient safety. .

Published with kind permission of The Southern Daily Echo