The sick truth of Labour's NHS: Corbyn claims only HIS party can be trusted with our health service but even its own bosses have been forced to find treatment for their loved ones elsewhere

  • Professor Siobhan McClelland was head of evidence at Macmillan Cancer Support
  • Her 66-year-old husband is suffering from an advanced form of prostate cancer 
  • Professor McClelland is moving from Wales to England for better treatment 

There are few people in Britain with more intimate knowledge of what makes our health system tick than Professor Siobhan McClelland.

An Oxford-educated health policy expert who was born and raised in Carmarthen, she has worked in the uppermost reaches of the NHS for 30 years, while also serving a stint as ‘head of evidence’ at the prestigious charity Macmillan Cancer Support. 

Such is her professional standing in the field of public health, that she’s often asked to help non-profit organisations design medical aid programmes overseas, and has worked as far afield as Pakistan and Cambodia.

In more recent times, Professor McClelland, who is 55, has focused largely on the health service in her native land — which since devolution in 1999 has been run entirely by the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff — taking the visiting professorship in the Health Economics department at the University of South Wales and a senior manager’s role at the former Gwent Health Authority. 

She has also been a professor of health policy at the Welsh Institute for Health and Social Care and vice-chairwoman of the Aneurin Bevan University health board. 

So great is Labour’s grip on the industrial heartlands of South Wales — it’s sometimes joked that residents would vote for a one-legged donkey if it wore a red rosette — that devolution has created what is effectively a one-party State

Today, she sits on the committee responsible for running the entire Welsh ambulance service.

In short Professor McClelland is one of the foremost experts in her field; someone whose opinions on the healthcare we receive ought to be taken very seriously indeed.

So when she claims to have ‘lost confidence and trust’ in the Welsh NHS, describes the way it’s being run as ‘fundamentally flawed’ and reveals that she’s taken the momentous decision to sell her house and move across the border to England in search of acceptable care for her gravely ill husband, it should be regarded as nothing less than a major scandal.

That is, of course, exactly what happened only a few days ago, when the professor gave a deeply moving interview to the BBC.

Speaking on the seafront in Manorbier, a picturesque village in Pembrokeshire where she has lived since 2011, the NHS boss revealed that ‘we have put our house on the market and are planning to move away’.

‘It’s for a number of reasons, but our loss of confidence and trust in the health system is a factor,’ she added. ‘We live in a beautiful place, but you can’t enjoy that if you are so anxious about what might happen in the future in relation to healthcare.’

There are few people in Britain with more intimate knowledge of what makes our health system tick than Professor Siobhan McClelland

There are few people in Britain with more intimate knowledge of what makes our health system tick than Professor Siobhan McClelland

The professor then detailed a grim and shameful catalogue of blunders surrounding the recent treatment provided to her 66-year-old husband — a local councillor she chose not to name — who is suffering from advanced prostate cancer.

They included ‘the difficulty in the first place of getting a GP’s appointment,’ when symptoms started to manifest, plus a delay in ‘getting referred onwards into the hospital system’ to see a specialist and undergo diagnostic tests.

Then, she said, came straightforward incompetence for which the local health board has apologised: ‘having had a scan,’ her husband ended up ‘finding that scan had been misread and the spread of cancer had not been recognised’.

Professor McClelland added: ‘All of those things have made a situation that was always going to be really hard all the more difficult’.

Her remarks in the BBC interview have proven as politically explosive as they are heart-rending. That’s because for almost 20 years now, the Welsh NHS has been run not just by the Assembly in Cardiff but also by a single political party: Labour.

To blame is the principality’s political landscape. For so great is Labour’s grip on the industrial heartlands of South Wales — it’s sometimes joked that residents would vote for a one-legged donkey if it wore a red rosette — that devolution has created what is effectively a one-party State.

Indeed, save for a couple of periods when it has ruled in coalition, the party has maintained an iron grip on every institution of government.

The outcome? A devolved education system that is, by a country mile, the worst in the UK (scandalously, the respected PISA performance rankings rate it in the bottom half of global leagues, behind the likes of Poland, Latvia and Communist Vietnam) and an NHS that lags behind England’s on multiple fronts and is mired in a never-ending succession of scandals.

Professor Siobhan McClelland claims to have ‘lost confidence and trust’ in the Welsh NHS, describes the way it’s being run as ‘fundamentally flawed’

Professor Siobhan McClelland claims to have ‘lost confidence and trust’ in the Welsh NHS, describes the way it’s being run as ‘fundamentally flawed’

‘We have a void in Welsh government where robust, rigorous, innovative policies should be made,’ was how she put it. ‘There is neither capacity nor I’d suggest sufficient capability in Welsh government to be making really good health policy.’

This comment, from a leading expert in her field, should alone provide a staggering rebuke to the notion, so often peddled in Westminster, that only Labour can be ‘trusted’ to handle the NHS properly.

Yet Professor Siobhan McClelland isn’t alone in her views. In fact she is at least the third senior figure in the Welsh NHS who has in recent years decided that the service it offers citizens isn’t good enough for them, and moved to England in search of better healthcare.

Take Irfon Williams, a 45-year-old father of five who worked as mental health services manager for Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board. In 2015, it emerged he’d left his family home in Bangor to lodge with a cousin across the border in Ellesmere Port.

The reason? He was suffering from bowel cancer, wanted to receive the drug Cetuximab, and had twice previously tried and failed to get the Welsh NHS to pay for it.

Feeling that time was fast running out — the earlier you treat all cancer, the better your chances — Mr Williams was able to register as an English NHS patient and receive the drug at the Christie Hospital in Manchester, one of the UK’s leading cancer facilities. Tragically, he died in 2017.

Indeed, save for a couple of periods when it has ruled in coalition, the party has maintained an iron grip on every institution of government 

Indeed, save for a couple of periods when it has ruled in coalition, the party has maintained an iron grip on every institution of government 

Then there was Mary Burrows, the former £200,000-a-year Chief Executive of the aforementioned Betsi Cadwaladr, which is the nation’s largest health authority. Also in 2015, she decided to up sticks from her home in Colwyn Bay, and move to London, taking up residence in her son’s flat in East Dulwich.

Burrows had been diagnosed with breast cancer and said a consultant had advised her that the drug which offered the best chance of survival was not available in Wales. She underwent treatment at one of the nation’s finest cancer hospitals, the Royal Marsden.

Writing on Facebook, she conceded that it was ‘very frustrating’ that so many Welsh patients were ‘having to tread such treacherous paths to seek a better quality of life’. Sadly, she also died later that year.

To residents of the principality, of which I am one, the revelation that so many of our health service’s bosses don’t trust it is soul-destroying, but hardly surprising.

Barely a day seems to go by without another sobering example of incompetence, mismanagement, corruption, and worse.

Only last month, we learned that the Government has launched a review of maternity services at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, following the deaths of 26 babies in the past two years.

Around 43 ‘serious incidents’ have come to light, many of them involving apparent failures to monitor mothers or their babies properly, or flag shortcomings correctly. Several bereaved mothers have already given heart-rending interviews about their treatment there.

One, Monique Aziz, told how she was sent home from hospital the day after giving birth, despite having concerns about her baby Jesse’s health. He died from an infection four days later.

Another, Chioma Udeogu, whose daughter Favour was stillborn in January 2017 after midwives failed to carry out checks for an astonishing 12 hours, said the experience left her ‘devastated’ and the health board has admitted failings and apologised.

Meanwhile, the most recent Welsh NHS figures reveal that almost one in five patients waited more than four hours for treatment at A&E in the past year. The official target, for 95 per cent to be seen within that period, has not been met for a decade.

An astonishing 38,904 people waited for more than 12 hours, a number that has increased by 15 per cent in a year.

Providing a stark insight into the culture of mismanagement — this time financial — has been a case at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court which last week saw three men convicted of defrauding the Welsh NHS of some £700,000.

The scam wasn’t exactly sophisticated. The men, who worked in Powys Health Board’s estates department, set up a dodgy construction company named after one of their cats, and proceeded to award it valuable contracts.

Professor Siobhan McClelland is at least the third senior figure in the Welsh NHS who has in recent years decided that the service it offers citizens isn’t good enough for them, and moved to England in search of better healthcare

Professor Siobhan McClelland is at least the third senior figure in the Welsh NHS who has in recent years decided that the service it offers citizens isn’t good enough for them, and moved to England in search of better healthcare

To cover their tracks, they sent emails pretending to be called Paul Hewson and David Evans — the real names of Bono and fellow band member the Edge from U2.

With scandals like these, it’s little wonder some of the most respected institutions in medicine have criticised the country’s health service.

Earlier this year, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine compared the average A&E ward in Wales to a ‘battlefield’ and said staff were ‘struggling to cope’ while ‘patient safety is being compromised daily.’ Unions said medical staff are ‘in despair’.

Living in Wales, I am sad to report my personal experience aligns with not just these organisations, but also David Cameron, who once described Offa’s Dyke as a ‘dividing line between life and death’.

A few years back, I wrote in these pages about an old friend, who had been forced to wait four months to see a consultant after reporting symptoms of bowel cancer. Having finally been diagnosed with the life-threatening condition, he was then made to wait another three months to begin treatment. Thanks to a series of cock-ups at a woefully understaffed hospital in Abergavenny, where he underwent an operation, he then contracted MRSA, further delaying the start of his urgent chemotherapy.

At the time the piece was published, my friend was still undergoing treatment. He later died, aged 69. We attended the memorial service early last year.

Scandalously, he was the second person I know to have come out of that hospital with MRSA. The other victim, Pam, a member of my local tennis club, picked up a virulent strain after going in for a hip operation. She, too, died.

So what’s going wrong? Well, as ever, when Labour applies its big state approach to public institutions, the problems facing the Welsh NHS have little to do with the amount of money being poured in.

 The most recent Welsh NHS figures reveal that almost one in five patients waited more than four hours for treatment at A&E in the past year (stock image)

 The most recent Welsh NHS figures reveal that almost one in five patients waited more than four hours for treatment at A&E in the past year (stock image)

In fact, the Welsh health budget, approaching £7 billion, equates to around £2,300 per person, marginally more than the £2,200 spent in England. And it seems to rise endlessly. At the time of devolution, in 1999, health accounted for 36 per cent of Welsh government spending. Now it makes up more than half. Instead, I believe the shortcomings lie firmly with the socialist agenda to which the Welsh public sector is built.

As my colleague Alex Brummer wrote recently, in an article about the appalling care his dying parents-in-law received in Cardiff, this among other things has resulted in the rejection of many of the private finance initiative contracts that allowed the rebuilding of England’s Victorian hospitals.

True, PFI was a financially flawed scheme favoured in Westminster by Labour — ironically — and this week abandoned by the Chancellor Philip Hammond, but at least it meant clean modern hospitals replaced tatty worn-out ones.

It has also led to expensive gimmicks, such as the provision of free prescriptions to everyone in the country (in England this is much more limited). Ludicrously, this creates perverse incentives that, for example, can make it cheaper for middle-class hay fever sufferers to visit their GP than to visit a pharmacy.

Money spent on free prescriptions cannot be spent employing specialist doctors. Perhaps this helps explain why around 19.5 per cent of Welsh patients wait more than six weeks for an MRI scan (in England the figure is 3.2 per cent) and 31.2 per cent wait more than six weeks for a colonoscopy (in England, just 11.4 per cent do).

Then there’s the antiquated, top-down structure of the Welsh NHS.

Unlike in England, where regional health boards were long abolished in favour of trusts, designed to have a degree of independence from Whitehall, the Welsh NHS is still run by just seven post-war style regional boards. Most are stuffed with Labour supporters and, in my view, comically mismanaged.

The official target, for 95 per cent to be seen within that period, has not been met for a decade

The official target, for 95 per cent to be seen within that period, has not been met for a decade

The most dysfunctional of the lot, Betsi Cadwaladr has now been in ‘special measures’ for more than three years. Three more are undergoing ‘targeted intervention’, the next step down the ladder of chaos.

One common yardstick of management strife — sickness rates among staff — hit record levels across Wales in January, with 6.2 per cent of working days lost due to illness (in the ambulance service, it was an astonishing 8.6 per cent), a figure roughly a quarter worse than the English equivalent.

Between December and March, managers across the country’s various providers meanwhile announced a staggering 159 Soviet-style ‘initiatives’ to improve care.

At its worst, Labour’s Welsh NHS gets caught up in petty nationalism. 

One particularly crazy idea, mooted a few years back, would have seen Welsh brain surgery patients forced to have operations in Wales, meaning someone from, say, Llandudno would be made to undergo a ten-hour round trip to Cardiff, rather than travelling along faster routes to nearer hospitals in Manchester or Liverpool. 

It was only scrapped after public protest.

It also instinctively rejects innovations that might involve that old bugbear of the Left, privatisation. 

In England, for example patients are often encouraged to shop around and travel to a different region if waiting lists are shorter. And many routine procedures, such as hip operations, are carried out for the NHS by private doctors.

Welsh Health Secretary Vaughan Gething used a debate in the Assembly to denounce poor Siobhan McClelland’s recent remarks

Welsh Health Secretary Vaughan Gething used a debate in the Assembly to denounce poor Siobhan McClelland’s recent remarks

In socialist Wales, that sort of thing’s anathema. So it goes that one poor patient, 77-year-old Ethel Barford, made headlines this year when she was told to wait until 2020 for a hip operation.

Ugliest of all, however, is the Welsh NHS’s treatment of critics, who are frequently met with extraordinary hostility, or accused of seeking to ‘do down’ Wales, when they only wish to raise legitimate concerns about the care they or their loved ones received.

It’s been six years, since the Labour MP Ann Clwyd described how her husband, Owen, died ‘like a battery hen’ after being appallingly neglected at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff.

For daring to share her experience, she was told to shut up and stop complaining by a Labour member of the Welsh assembly.

This August, Clwyd revealed that 4,500 people had written to her with similar horror stories, while two of her close friends have died at the same hospital ‘and complaints have been made about their treatment as well’.

But still heartfelt criticism is routinely ignored.

Only last week, Welsh Health Secretary, Vaughan Gething, used a debate in the Assembly to denounce poor Siobhan McClelland’s recent remarks, saying: ‘I don’t accept the system-wide criticism she makes of the National Health Service here in Wales.’

To Mr Gething — currently standing for the Welsh Labour leadership — I have a simple question.

If Professor McClelland, Irfon Williams and Mary Burrows did not reckon the Labour-run Welsh NHS was competent to treat them, when they fell sick, why on earth do you think the rest of us should think any differently?

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