ORTHOPAEDIC HOSPITALS, SOUTH WALES (Hansard, 10 June 1947)

§ Mr. George Thomas (Cardiff, Central)
I wish to raise a subject of major importance to the people of South Wales, and it is one which I believe reveals a story of human tragedy. This is a subject which was brought to my notice by the distressed parents who brought their five-years-old son to my office in the constituency which I have the honour to represent. The mother's story is best told in her own words, as she wrote it to me and, subsequently, on my advice, to this House: Will you help me in any way you possibly can concerning my tittle boy, Roger, aged five years. He has infantile paralysis down the right side, and has been attending the Prince of Wales Hospital at City Lodge, Cardiff, for three and a half years, waiting for attention, and on the urgent list since Christmas. When I make inquiries I am told he must wait his turn, but, in all fairness, I think, I have waited patiently enough. The lady goes on to other domestic details that hon. Members of this House would find distressing. I did what any other hon. Member would do.. I made approaches to the only orthopaedic hospital there is in South Wales, and I found that this little patient is due to have an operation for elongation of the tendon Achilles. That operation is considered by surgeons necessary in order to assist the boy to walk properly.
Unfortunately, there is such an enormous demand for beds for in-patients that this child of this constituent of mine is but one of 121 cases that have been listed 1030 by the surgeons as of supreme urgency. The total number of patients approved for admission to this single orthopaedic hospital in South Wales exceeds 1,250, and this number, I am assured, has been artificially restricted by the surgeons of the hospital, who, realising the extreme difficulty in arranging admission, have fore-borne from recommending indoor treatment when there is any reasonable alternative. There is a bed capacity only of 134 in the hospital, which is supposed to meet the needs of a population of 2,000,000 people.
Before the war, it was customary to refer to South Wales as a distressed area. It would be equally true and equally apt to call it a neglected area. My hon. Friend who is going to reply to this Debate will be aware that we are in our present sorry position in South Wales because the voluntary hospital system failed miserably to meet the needs of our people. We had no planning whatsoever in other days to meet the health needs of our community. I do not want to saddle His Majesty's Government with the responsibility for the complete and utter neglect of previous Governments so far 'as the health administration in South Wales is concerned. But the Ministry of Works—and I am glad the Parliamentary Secretary is here to reply to this statement tonight—can by no means congratulate itself upon what it has done for South Wales since it has had the opportunity, from July, 1945.
In August, 1945, the Welsh Board of Health, recognising the priority of need to create an adequate orthopaedic service, invited the Prince of Wales Orthopaedic Hospital Committee to take over the ex-American Army Hospital at Rhyd Lafar. This is a hospital on the outskirts of Cardiff, which could have provided by now the Prince of Wales with an extra 350 beds. The Committee, naturally, accepted that offer with alacrity, and they have submitted a scheme to the Ministry of Works for its consideration and for its action. The scheme was submitted, if my information be correct, to the Ministry of Works on 24th July, 1946. The scheme has been approved by the Welsh Board of Health, and has been regarded by them as one of the highest priority. The tragedy of this is that the children who are so crippled are receiving no adequate treatment whatsoever. The waiting list at this hospital is growing all the time, and there is a deep concern on the part 1031 of the health administrators at the apparent lack of sense of urgency by the Ministry of Works. That is a concern which is shared, so I am informed, by all responsible medical authorities in South Wales.
Over 550 of the patients waiting admission to the Prince of Wales' Orthopaedic Hospital in Cardiff are children, and in a very great many cases the very nature of their disability prevents them from attending ordinary schools. This hospital is recognised by the Ministry of Education as a school hospital, and seven full-time school teachers are employed to teach these children, who are receiving medical treatment. The tragedy is that at the present time the greater part of those 550 children are not only losing the attention of which they stand in urgent need, but are suffering as far as their education is concerned. Some of these children will inevitably be handicapped throughout their life, but it is doubly unfortunate, I suggest to the House, that their mental development should be retarded, thus diminishing their already small chance of becoming useful citizens. The Ministry of Works needs to be reminded that there are some matters which must have a priority. There are some matters which deserve, by the very nature of their urgency, a sense of which appears to be lacking in this Department, to have immediate attention. There is never any use trying to find somebody to blame. What there is use in doing is to find somebody to probe, and I believe I have found somebody to probe. I think I have also found somebody who needs to be probed. Far be it from me to lay any blame, but I want to suggest that the Ministry of Works is not living up to its name as far as the hospitals of South Wales are concerned.
This is a human problem, and we cannot afford the apparently lethargic indifference or Chinese fatalism which says, "Do not do today what we can do tomorrow." I hope that when my hon. Friend replies to me, he will be able to give us substantial hope that this hospital, which I pass every week-end when I go home from my constituency, will not be allowed to rot any longer and that the 60 building operatives who are now in the building who are part of the mobile labour force and who are living in this hospital while engaged on the renovation of the camp, will be allowed to remain there 1032 after 30th June in order to put the hospital right and improve these amenities so as to give these children the opportunity to receive fair treatment.

§ Mr. James Callaghan (Cardiff, South)
Before my hon. Friend resumes his seat, can he tell us what Happened after July, 1946? Has the Ministry of Works not made any answer to the suggestion to take the hospital over?

§ Mr. Thomas
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for South Cardiff (Mr. Callaghan) for drawing my attention to that matter. My information from the medical people interested is that they have had nothing since July, 1946. I would quote a letter I have received, dated loth May: Since early in 1946 we have been waiting for the Minister of Works to complete this work, but the main contract has not yet been commenced and the number of patients clamouring for admission steadily increases, and the position becomes more and more intolerable.

§ The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Works (Mr. Durbin)
I would like to begin by assuring the House and my hon. Friend that the Ministry of Works is not composed of hard-hearted men and women who wish to oppose the development of orthopaedic hospitals or indeed, of any kind of hospitals in any part of the country. I am sure my hon. Friend will be aware that all over the country we are faced by the acute human tragedy that the shortage of hospital accommodation everywhere brings to the notice of hon. Members. But I am sure my hon. Friend realises it is no part of the responsibility of my Ministry to decide what hospitals should be built or where they are to be built, or the order in which they are to be built. If that were the responsibility of the Ministry of Works, I would, in fact, be discharging the duties of the Ministry of Health, and what applies to hospitals in the field of health would apply in the field of education and elsewhere. The decisions as to the order in which these buildings are to be put up must rest with the Ministers responsible for providing the services.
It may be asked where the Ministry of Works comes into this story at all, and why is it that I am appearing to answer the case that has been presented by my hon. Friend. The responsibility of the Ministry of Works in regard to this case 1033 is of two sorts. First of all, we have to offer advice to the Department concerned with getting the building up, on purely technical problems, of a legal, planning and constructional character; and then it is our responsibility, when these difficulties are cleared out of the way, to get the building done. Unfortunately, in the case of this proposed hospital at Rhyd Lafar, the difficulties in the first place, as a building proposition, are very great and formidable. The camp or American hospital was a war-time construction and is composed largely of Nissen type substandard hutments. They are, to put it mildly, most unsatisfactory and unsuitable buildings for hospital accommodation.

§ Mr. G. Thomas
Is the Parliamentary Secretary not aware that the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Health have accepted this place as suitable? They want only minor alterations, if my information is correct.

§ Mr. Durbin
I am afraid my hon. Friend's information is not quite correct on this point. It wants substantial and costly works, alterations which will absorb sums of money running into six figures, and it is an extremely uneconomic kind of building, expensive at the beginning, and expensive in subsequent maintenance. Nevertheless, this is not regarded by the Minister of Works as a crippling objection. The second range of difficulties arises over the fact that the Ministry of Town and Country Planning do not feel able to give clearance over any long number of years for the continuation of this type of building on this particular piece of land, so that the combination of these two makes this, as a building proposition, not wholly satisfactory.
Finally, and in a sense most serious of all, through the very site, there is to be driven, in a reasonable period of time, a main arterial road. My information is that this will subtract some considerable fraction, amounting to a third of the total land and accommodation available. For all these reasons, therefore, there was considerable difficulty in arriving at a view as to the desirability of this piece of construction in the interests of the country as a whole, and I need hardly remind 1034 hon. Members and certainly not the hon. Member for Central Cardiff (Mr. G. Thomas), that there is a great scarcity of building labour and of building materials in South Wales as a whole, and that not a man and not a brick, and not a piece of timber, can be diverted to any project, however urgent, without taking away from buildings whose priorities have been considered higher in the previous decisions that have been taken by responsible Ministries. These are the difficulties.
I have two conclusions to offer. First I would not seek to deny that there has been considerable delay in this particular case. I must, however, offer a word of explanation of why that delay has taken place. Of course, if one goes to any regional office of any Ministry in these difficult transitional times, picks out a single case and looks at the dates upon it, one can construct a story that looks as though it were one of unnecessary confusion and delay. But that is an unfair way of judging the course of administration and the pace at which decisions have been taken, because it is the burden on the office as a whole that must be considered before the time taken to arrive at any single decision can rightly be judged. It is common knowledge that certain sections of our office in the Welsh region have burdens so great—for reasons which are so many, and so obvious, that I do not need to mention them—that some delay in a particular case is quite inevitable in view of the pressure, particularly upon the technical staff.
My second conclusion is that, despite these difficulties, despite these scarcities and despite the burden that rests upon our regional office, we are proposing to continue with this scheme. The work is in hand. Clearances are being sought, the legal business is being discharged, the project is included in our future building programme for that part of the country, and we hope to be able to give a starting date towards the end of the summer, or during the course of October.

§ Mr. Thomas
May I thank the Parliamentary Secretary very much?