Contribution
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for securing this debate. I will talk largely about Frome community hospital, but a lot of what she has said about test and learn and trial closures applies to Frome as well. I will also talk about the issues that occur when communities are served by organisations in different health authority boundaries and the impact of a lack of communications there.
Community hospitals, as we have heard, are the backbone of local healthcare. They keep people closer to home, ease pressure on our general hospitals and allow families to support loved ones through recovery without the burden of long journeys. That is especially so in more rural areas like my constituency, where travel times can be long and public transport is limited. For many of my constituents, Frome community hospital is an important community hub, where people access lifesaving care for themselves and their families. In fact, my husband’s life was saved by a team at Frome hospital earlier this year when he went into anaphylactic shock and was able to get to the urgent care department in Frome much quicker than he could have got to the general hospital in Bath. I put on record my thanks to the nurses who treated him that day.
Last summer, Somerset ICB cut the number of beds at Frome hospital as part of a test and learn consultation, the criteria for which seem very unclear to me. I know from visiting the Royal United hospital, our general hospital in Bath, that one of the biggest challenges facing it is getting patients discharged to appropriate community settings. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds talked about ambulances queueing; as I understand it, one of the main reasons that ambulances queue at our general hospital is because, at the other end of the hospital, patients cannot be discharged to community settings, yet we are cutting beds in those settings. I am therefore unconvinced that those cuts can be justified. I have continued to push for the restoration of the beds at Frome hospital, but I have also spoken to the ICB about the possibility of the hospital becoming one of the community hubs that the Government have rolled out, which I think could be a really good opportunity for semi-rural areas.
Across the country, ICBs are taking very different approaches to consulting MPs on the roll-out of these hubs. Some have engaged constructively and early, but in Somerset there was unfortunately no consultation with me at all. Instead, I was given a list of locations that had already been chosen, none of which were located in Frome and East Somerset. I do not believe that that is how engagement with elected representatives is supposed to work, which matters particularly for constituencies like mine.
Much of east Somerset sits across different local authority and health boundaries. Many of my constituents’ usual experience of hospital care is at a hospital that until recently was outside of our own ICB area altogether. When that hospital does not have proper joint working arrangements with our ICB, those patients find themselves effectively pushed to the back of the queue, simply because joined-up planning between the two systems is not happening.
That is no fault of the patients or of the staff trying to care for them. It is a structural failure that leaves whole communities at a disadvantage because they happen to sit on the wrong side of a line on a map. However, in the Somer valley in my constituency, things are working rather differently. There, the relationship between Bath and North East Somerset council and the ICB appears to be working well, with genuine collaboration shaping local services. It shows what can be achieved when councils, communities and ICBs sit down together as equal partners from the outset.
I ask the Minister to ensure that the Department reinforces to ICBs, including Somerset, that consultation with local MPs and councils on community hub proposals is not optional but essential if communities are to be properly heard. My constituents deserve a community hospital that reflects the needs of a growing town and a process that treats them as genuine partners in shaping it. At a time when the Government are closing down Healthwatch, I welcome the Minister’s thoughts on how we can prioritise patients’ voices in health provision.