Yesterday in Parliament, Lucy secured a debate on the issue of health spending and inequality in healthcare, in the context of the Future Fit spending in Shropshire.
It is the case that those areas that are the most deprived also suffer from the poorest health and healthcare outcomes.
This has formed the centre of Lucy's concerns about Future Fit - a plan that overlooks the principle that health spending should be directed where the healthcare need is greatest. This has not been the driving force behind the hospital transformation programme in Shropshire - which will result in significant capital spend in Shrewsbury and relocation of some services from the Princess Royal Hospital to the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.
The evidence is clear that Telford has greater health inequalities and unlike Shrewsbury or Shropshire as a whole, falls below the English average on key metrics: life expectancy, cancer survival rates, and rates of cardiovascular disease.
Future Fit is £221m over budget and the health bodies have requested more funding. Lucy takes the view that if extra funding is available it should be spent where need is greatest, on prevention and diagnostics and not on cutting edge buildings located many miles from the poorest communities.
Lucy will continue to scrutinise health spending and fight for investment to be made where it is needed most - on a healthcare basis and not as a bureaucratic exercise.
If Members look at a map of areas of deprivation in the whole of Shropshire, they will see in Telford, splashed in red, a cluster of 18 lower super output areas in the bottom decile for deprivation. That compares with only two such areas in the whole of the rest of the county. On every health measure, people in Telford have worse outcomes than people in Shropshire. For example, cancer incidence, cancer mortality and later-stage diagnosis are all much higher in Telford than they are in Shropshire. In Shropshire, the mortality rate is 8% below the national average, whereas in Telford it is 15% above the national average.
The problem in Telford is getting worse, not better. This is what we should be talking about in Telford, but we do not. Instead, for the last nine years, the health bodies in Shropshire—the clinical commissioning group, the hospital trust, the sustainability and transformation plan, the integrated care system—have all being talking about a capital spending plan that was once called “Future Fit” but is now referred to as a hospital transformation plan. This plan is expensive and controversial.
Extract from Lucy's speech
