Charlotte Leslie MP: We need a judge-led inquiry into the NHS - one which goes right to the top

Charlotte Leslie is the Member of Parliament for Bristol North West. Follow Charlotte on Twitter.

One of the most devastating things about the Morecambe Bay Scandal - the revelation that the Care Quality Commission (CQC) apparently buried a report raising alarms about the Furness General Hospital Maternity Unit - is that, for anyone who has spent a lot of time looking into how the top echelons of how the NHS elite work, it is diabolically shocking, but not nearly as surprising as it should be.

Indeed, one of my fears is that because the Morecambe Bay revelation is so sickening, so horrific, all focus will be attracted to investigations into just one hospital. It is imperative there is a police investigation into what went on at Morecambe, but mounting evidence also shows that Morecambe Bay and Mid Staffs are likely to be just symptoms of a worrying network of cover-up at the heart of the NHS.

Right from the very beginning of the Mid Staffs scandal, New Labour were at contorted pains to stress that this was a ‘one-off’; not representative of the health service and its target-culture reforms at all. That is why it is so important to squash what was going on at Morecambe – and, I suspect we will find, at other hospitals as well.

In March 2010, Professor Brian Jarman, who collects and analyses mortality data, wrote to the then Secretary of State, Andy Burnham, warning him that 25 Hospital Trusts had alarmingly high mortality rates. This was just before a general election. Burnham quickly passed to buck to, yes, the CQC, and conveniently, (and unsurprisingly, given what we now know) no more was said about it.  In 2008, Labour Ministers and the Department of Health determinedly buried three reports they had commissioned from independent international experts which were highly damning of the NHS ‘culture of fear’. (One of these was by Don Berwick, who is now being hailed as the man to sort out our NHS.) They were only revealed after a Freedom of Information Request in 2010, after a tip-off from a concerned medic.

Charlotte Leslie MP: What the Royal College of Nursing can learn from the teaching unions

Charlotte Leslie is Member of Parliament for Bristol North West. Follow Charlotte on Twitter.

On Monday, the Royal College of Nursing Congress voted, by an overwhelming majority, to keep its dual status – as both a Royal College, selflessly promoting excellent practice with a focus on welfare of patients, and at the same time as a Union, promoting and protecting the welfare and interest of its members.

Not all Royal Colleges are like this. The Royal College of Surgeons and of Physicians, for example, are adamant that they should never take on any Union role, and keep interests of the practitioners completely separate from the function of the Royal College, which, they argue, should have a single, and relentless focus on quality of practice, of care, and patients.  The intention is that the voice of a Royal College to the public is simply: “It’s all about you”.

The Francis Report, looking into how up to 1200 excess deaths occurred at Mid Staffs, had recommended that the Royal College of Nursing break off this dual function, to become solely focused on excellent nursing and care standards, with a relentless patient, not practitioner focus. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has just rejected this.

Of course, every institution has an inbuilt reluctance for change, and it is easy to see how and why the Royal College of Nursing would be resistant to altering its role. But I fear that this decision has missed a valuable opportunity for nurses and the nursing profession as a whole.

Charlotte Leslie MP: Who tried to supress three crucial reports into NHS deaths under Labour?

Charlotte Leslie is Member of Parliament for Bristol North West. Follow Charlotte on Twitter.

The most important moment of the appearance of Sir David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the NHS, in front of the Health Select Committee this week has gone largely un-noticed. It was the moment when Sir David passed responsibility for covering up vital evidence that urgent change was needed in Labour’s NHS away from himself.

It was when he made the extraordinary claim that he knew nothing about three crucial reports that had been commissioned from international experts by Labour Minister Lord Darzi (and not the Chief Medical Officer, as Nicholson told the Committee) to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the NHS.

Charlotte Leslie MP: Keep the EU out of our NHS

Charlotte Leslie is Member of Parliament for Bristol North West. Follow Charlotte on Twitter.

As EU Budget negotiations rage, then drag on in Brussels, the world sees the EU Commission drift even further from reality in its expectations over its own expenditure. Meanwhile, firmly back in reality, another dangerous and tragic side-effect of Planet EU is unfurling, in hospitals up and down the country, on a daily basis.

The sad irony is that health is not an EU competency – it was never supposed to have any remit over member states’ health services. However, through a seeping of side-effects, EU Directives are having a devastating effect on the training of our doctors, and the safety of our patients.

The two main culprits are the European Working Time Directive, limiting junior doctor training to 48 hours per week; and the ‘Recognition of Professional Qualifications Directive’ – which has prevented the General Medical Council from making the ability to speak English a requirement for medical registration for EU Doctors – unlike non-EU doctors who must pass a language test.

Each directive is beginning to reap its own grim headlines; There is the case of Dr. Daneil Ubani who caused the death of his patient David Gray by injecting ten times the recommended dose of diamorphine. He was able to treat patients despite having failed an English Language test. And earlier this year, after the tragic death of Kane Gorney who died from dehydration in hospital, the coroner identified the Working Time Directive as one of the key factors responsible.

Charlotte Leslie MP: We could save £1billion and 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide by ending the dual-seat arrangement of the EU

Charlotte Leslie is the Member of Parliament for Bristol North West. Follow Charlotte on Twitter.

If I told you we could save over £1billion for taxpayers in the next seven years, and at the same time prevent some 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, you'd think people might just start to listen. How about if I then told you this would not be through some drastic measure that would hit businesses and public sector workers but had the support of countries around Europe and was actually included in our Coalition Agreement? Too good to be true? The fact is that if we adhered to our Coalition Agreement and removed the two seat operation of the European Parliament, all this would be achieved. 

Amazingly, the anachronism that is the travelling circus between Brussels and Strasbourg still happens in the European Parliament. Why? So that the French feel included in Europe and, largely, to keep the Alsatian tourist industry in business.

Through the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament is compelled to meet 12 times a year for voting sessions in Strasbourg, but the buildings in Brussels are more than capable of this task. Last year Ashley Fox, MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, tabled an amendment that removed one of these sittings. Given the enormous cost financially and environmentally, you'd think that ending this shenanigans might be common sense. But this is Europe, so think again.

Charlotte Leslie MP: The Coalition must defend the NHS from EU directives as doggedly as it passed its health reforms

Charlotte Leslie is the Member of Parliament for Bristol North West.

Peer into the heart of the tumult surrounding the Government’s NHS reforms, and at the centre there’s the pretty uncontroversial principle of putting doctors, not managers, at the heart of our National Health Service. A hefty shift in this direction has been long overdue. But I have consistently argued through a ten-minute rule Bill, a back-bench business debate, and in questions to the Prime Minister, that any policy to empower our clinicians against the management-speak wielding bureaucrats must tackle the disaster that is the New Deal, (limiting doctors’ hours to 56 hours per week) together with the European Working Time Directive – which limits junior doctor working hours to 48hours per week.

Last week, the Royal College of Physicians published a concerning report: ‘Hospitals on the Edge’. They warned not only of very significant demand-side challenges – dramatically increasing numbers of patients, as well as changing needs of those patients, but of more controllable factors: the current organisation of hospital care. Problems include a dramatic reduction in continuity of care, and a ‘looming workforce crisis in the medical workforce’.

One of the biggest factors identified in this workforce crisis was “the reduced working hours of junior doctors imposed by the New Deal and the European Working Time Directive”. The report suggested that continuity of care has been affected (meaning that the patient sees more doctors, with more hand-overs, where crucial clinical details can get lost under time pressure and things can go wrong); that trainee doctors do not get the same kind of quality interaction with their trainers, and that enforced compensatory rest (as specified under a bizarre European Court of Justice Ruling) is depriving trainees working at night of daytime training opportunities. The report also points out that ironically, the shift-patterns imposed by the EU Working Time Directive and New Deal, which were supposedly intended to make junior doctors' training less arduous, has actually made their quality of life worse.

Charlotte Leslie MP: Our London 2012 legacy must be to instil the Olympic value of competition in our national culture

Charlotte Leslie is the Member of Parliament for Bristol North West.

What’s the saddest statistic in sport? Sorry to dampen the mood, but Lord Moynihan can’t be far off when he said it is that in Beijing 2008, 50% of our Olympic medals came from just 7% of our school population – privately educated athletes.

Plenty of sports are not ‘posh’ - boxing in particular often provides a road to glory for some of the most disenfranchised. It would also be interesting to know how many athletes had left state education to accept a scholarship at a private school specifically to concentrate on their sport in a specialist environment (as at Millfield School). But regardless, that statistic and that rich pool of wasted talent in the remaining 93% cannot be ignored.

But I fear that Lord Moynihan’s solution may be too narrow. Yes, we need more focus on sport in schools – many schools that have introduced boxing attest to resulting academic and behaviour improvements. Schools need better engagement with local clubs, and better talent spotting – groups like ‘Sport Inspired’ help and I’m hoping Government focus on this will pay off.

We must also get cleverer about funding facilities: The Football Foundation successfully enables communities to ‘own’ their new facilities, but more can be done to use profitable areas of sport (eg. five-a-side football) to cross-subsidise the unprofitable, and enable community social enterprises to run their facilities effectively.

Yes, all must be done. But this damning statistic was after 10 years of Labour’s lavish spending on schools and suggests that if we concentrate on facilities alone, we will not identify, let alone tackle, the deeper roots of the problem.

Damian Hinds MP and Charlotte Leslie MP: Why Gove’s EBacc can help narrow the gap

Damian Hinds is the Conservative MP for East Hampshire and Charlotte Leslie is the Conservative MP for Bristol North West.

Today the Education Select Committee publishes its report on the introduction of the E-Bacc. Michael Gove’s English Baccalaureate, or ‘E-Bacc’, consists of GCSEs in English, Maths, Science, a language and History or Geography.  Looking at who has been passing these subjects not only demonstrates the decline in some academic subjects; it also lays bare a concerning gulf between rich and poor. We know that of the 80,000 children on free school meals, fewer make it to Oxbridge than from each of six independent schools. Looking at children’s school attainment through the lens of the E-Bacc makes one of the reasons for this a little clearer: Poorer children are just not being steered towards the subjects that top universities require.

In 2010, fewer than one in six pupils achieved passes at C or above in the complete set of E-Bacc subjects.  And among the poorest – those on free school meals – it was one in 25. 

Chris Skidmore, Nick Cuff and Charlotte Leslie: The Invisible Children

"Invisible Children" is the first part of the Bow Group’s "Invisible Nation" series. The research report, to be published in full tomorrow, uncovers the thousands of ‘The Invisible Children’ who never make it to the league tables.

It is ten years since Tony Blair made education his priority in government. An entire generation of pupils have passed through school under Labour’s watch. Pupils who were in the first year of primary school in May 1997 finished their GCSEs last summer. So, has every child mattered?

It is well known that over half of all pupils do not gain five good GCSEs including a grade C in either maths or English. This is the standard that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority advises pupils need to function as citizens.