SAVING THE STAFFORDSHIRE AMBULANCE SERVICE
7th February 2006
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con): The hon. Member for Tamworth (Mr. Jenkins) said that he has no objection to his Primary Care Trusts merging, as long as it provides a better service, but he is concerned about the criteria for such mergers. I agree with him.
But I am not here tonight to talk about the South Staffordshire PCT; I am here to talk about the merger of the Staffordshire ambulance service. A few months ago, a friend of mine, a youngish guy, went jogging round Whittington, a village in my constituency. He felt sick. He did not know what was wrong with him. He went home, took a shower and started feeling worse. He went downstairs and suddenly thought, "There's something seriously wrong." He dialled 999 and then collapsed.
All Staffordshire ambulance service staff are paramedics; in fact, the service was the first in the United Kingdom to employ paramedics. The ambulances are strategically placed, controlled by global positioning system satellites, which Staffordshire was also the first to introduce. So the ambulance arrived within five minutes, and the paramedics defibrillated my friend. They gave him an injection of decoagulants and he was taken to Burton hospital; he survived. If that had happened in the west midlands, he would undoubtedly have died. The simple fact is that the response times in the west midlands are far worse than those in Staffordshire. In fact, Staffordshire enjoys the fastest response times not just in the United Kingdom but in the whole European Union.
Mr. Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent, South) (Lab): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Michael Fabricant: I will give way to a fellow Staffordshire Member of Parliament.
Mr. Flello: Will the hon. Gentleman mention also that, of all the ambulance services, Staffordshire probably uses the most anticoagulant drugs to good effect?
Michael Fabricant: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. In fact, the service's use of those drugs is beyond the normal clinical protocols for the national ambulance services. Staffordshire ambulance service can also provide angioplasty, and through cardiac enzyme testing, which is generally not available elsewhere, it can manage patients with chest pain who are not transported to hospital. There is even a cooling protocol for those with post-cardiac arrest, to stop brain damage and other tissue damage. That is unique, yet the Government, either wittingly or unwittingly, are to destroy it.
The response to life-threatening emergencies within eight minutes in Staffordshire is a staggering 88 per cent. The NHS average is only 75 per cent. In the east midlands, where there has been a merged ambulance service, it is only 75 per cent. These are Department of Health figures. For category B, which are serious emergency call-outs, in Staffordshire the response is within eight minutes 85 per cent. of the time. In the west midlands it is only 46 per cent. of the time, and in the east midlands, the model for a regional system of ambulance services, it is only 27 per cent. of the time. Any doctor will tell you that time is life. There is a golden period in which, perhaps, someone can be rescued from death. The Staffordshire ambulance service succeeds in that while other ambulance services fail.
I suspect that the Minister will say that, if Staffordshire ambulance service is merged with the west midlands, standards throughout will be raised. I do not think so, and nor does the board of the Staffordshire ambulance service. Members of the board say:
"Our concerns are that there is little, if anything, in the documents to explain how high performance will be protected.
Staffordshire consistently responds quicker, saves more lives from cardiac arrest and heart attacks and operates a cheaper response to emergency patients.
Discussions within the West Midlands region lead us to feel more, not less, alarmed at the prospects of standards falling, and of lives being lost which otherwise would have been saved."
All of us as Members of Parliament have a duty of care to our constituents. What can be more important than standing up in this House and trying to do something to stop the unnecessary loss of our constituents' lives?
Amazingly, it is estimated that, if other ambulance services adopted the practice of the Staffordshire ambulance service, some 3,000 extra lives a year in the United Kingdom could be saved.
Yet, are the Government saying, "Yes, we will preserve the Staffordshire ambulance service and we will use its protocols across other services"? No, they are not.
The Minister gave it away in her introductory speech. She said that the object of the exercise is to provide a regional-based system—but why? If it were a regional-based system that could improve response times, that would be fine by me. I would not care if a regional system were best. If it were larger than a region, that would be fine. I am interested in only one thing, and that is a better service for my constituents. What is clear from looking at the east midlands model and from listening to the professionals in Staffordshire and, indeed, in Birmingham and the west midlands as a whole, is that the fine, high standards maintained in Staffordshire would be lost, and that that would result in lives being lost in Staffordshire and elsewhere.
The irony is that the Government may be concerned solely with saving money, but Staffordshire ambulance service is the most cost-effective service in the country. It says:
"To our knowledge, there are no services of the proposed size anywhere in the world that achieve high performance"
as the Staffordshire ambulance service does. We should be rejoicing in this Chamber; the Minister should be saying, "We are proud as a Government that we have achieved that in Staffordshire, and we want to repeat it elsewhere."
The Staffordshire ambulance service goes on to say:
"We would argue that the creation of eleven regional services is not only a step too far, too soon, but a barrier to high performance."
I agree.
The figures are clear; the lives saved are indisputable. If the Staffordshire ambulance service is merged with the west midlands, lives will be lost. They will be unnecessarily lost and this Government will be to blame.
At the end of the debate, the Health Minister, Liam Byrne (a Birmingham MP) remarked:
Mr. Byrne: Turning to the west midlands, the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) made a powerful and persuasive case in which he underlined and celebrated the achievements of Staffordshire ambulance from which many in the country could learn. He was, perhaps, over-hasty in writing off the performance of the rest of the west midlands, but there is a clear message that we should take from his remarks, and it was underlined by my hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly) and for Stoke-on-Trent, South (Mr. Flello): there must be localisation of control. Surely the question in this consultation, though, is how we export that excellence, not just to other parts of the west midlands but to other parts of the country, and how we ensure that Staffordshire gets better in future. Surely it has not reached its full potential.
