NHS Funding for East London
06 Nov 2002
Ms Diane Abbott: I support everything that my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) said. He and other colleagues who have spoken raised a specific point about population mobility and how it bears down on resources and on GPs. Is there any possibility in the future of the formula taking into account population mobility? As we know, there are excellent services in the area—I had my baby in Homerton hospital, and I could not have had better care anywhere. As the Minister will also know, however, east London saw a swathe of hospital closures in the 1980s and 1990s: the Mothers hospital, the old Hackney hospital, St. Leonard's, and the Queen Elizabeth II hospital. We were promised increased resources for primary care, and we are still waiting to see them. Jacqui Smith: My hon. Friend makes an important point about the particular pressures that come from population disruption as much as from population numbers. I believe that we already recognise, in the way in which we distribute primary care resources, some elements of that disruption, but she makes a very strong case. That is something that we need to consider in the way in which we allocate resources, and in the way in which we target some of the additional support that I shall talk about in a moment.
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