View from the House: Trapped within layers of NHS bureaucracy

Jan 19 2010 Dominic Grieve MP for Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire Advertiser

JUST before Christmas, I took part with other Buckinghamshire MPs in a debate in the Westminster Hall of Commons on health care in our county.

The health service is going to be one of the major issues in what is now inescapably a General Election year, so I am glad that I and my colleagues have had the opportunity to shine a spotlight on what is happening here.

Resources and funding are once more the key issues, but I also wanted to emphasise those perennial matters, like the care for elderly people in modest circumstances, who have been treated in hospital and now need to move on to the next stage of care. This is something which constituents write to me, talk to me and come to see me about week after week in advice surgeries and elsewhere.

I call it the 'reverse turf war'. Usually agencies like to keep other agencies away from their territory. But in the instance of care for the elderly, the responsible agencies actually want others to come in and take over the services that they ought to be providing, but for which they do not have the means.

These are not arguments about the care of people who have savings or resources, but often people who have very little income.

I have every sympathy with agencies like our primary care trust, because it has been put in a situation where crisis management is a daily feature of life, caused by endless layers of bureaucracy.

But my greatest sympathy is and always will be reserved for the patients and their families who are also trapped in those layers of bureaucracy.