Dr Ellie Chowns

The Darzi report made it very clear that our NHS is under- funded, overstretched and too hospital focused. That has also been a focus of today’s debate so far. I welcome what I heard from the Secretary of State, in last week’s debate on the Darzi report, about investment and reform, and a shift from hospital to community and from sickness to prevention. We all want those things, but they will not happen without more investment, and without a crucial reform in the way the NHS is funded. We have seen a drift towards an increasing focus on acute services and on hospital services at the expense of investment in preventive healthcare and the primary services that we all recognise are so needed, and that my constituents in North Herefordshire so desperately want. They want to be able to see a GP, and they want to see the community frontline services that will save their health, and will save the NHS money, in the long run. Can the Minister assure me that she and her colleagues have been doing everything possible to urge the Chancellor to make available the billions of pounds of investment in the NHS that are necessary to bring us back up to scratch in comparison with our peers? Darzi said that we are underfunded in comparison with similar health services. Will she assure me that the Government are considering putting in place some sort of mechanism to protect funding for primary and community care, and indeed to ratchet it up over the years? The way things happen at the moment is that hospitals constantly overspend and those overspends are constantly plugged, which is why the money is going more and more into hospitals and less and less into primary care. Will we get the billions of pounds of investment in the Budget that we need, and will we get that protection and ratchet mechanism for primary care funding that is the only way to ensure that the extra doctors, extra appointments and so forth are delivered?