Hansard

No. The member should save her questions for the minister.

I hope that the minister will be able to show the way forward for the future of transplant surgery in Scotland.

We are not looking for scapegoats. I insist: this issue is far too important for party political posturing. Members from all parties are as anxious as I am to hear the minister's response to the debate. It is also of note that a petition containing more than 10,000 signatures will be presented to the Parliament in the next half hour by patients and staff from the unit. I therefore hope that the minister will take the opportunity to provide the answers that we all seek.

It is important that we do not forget the people at the centre of the crisis—the 26 seriously ill people from all over Scotland who are on the heart transplant waiting list and the more than 200 people who have received their heart transplant and now depend on the Glasgow unit for post-operative care and long-term monitoring.

The situation first came to public attention on 3 May. With every passing day since then, it becomes more obvious that the problem did not start with the resignation of the unit's sole transplant surgeon. To address the situation truly, it is necessary to examine the history of the transplant unit since it was set up in December 1991. At that time, the heart transplant unit had two consultant surgeons capable of performing transplants. That continued until 1995, when the unit was left with only one permanent consultant. It was at that stage that alarm bells should have started to ring. Given the stressful nature of being on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, did not it occur to the trust that the situation was not sustainable?

However, we must realise that the buck did not stop with the trust or the health board. In April 1993, responsibility for the unit's funding was transferred from the health board and the unit became a centrally funded national facility under the direct control of the Scottish Office, now the Scottish Executive. Perhaps someone on the Tory benches could enlighten us as to what was done back in 1995. It is also pertinent to ask the minister what has happened to the funding for the second consultant surgeon? Did it continue despite only one surgeon being in place? Was it cut? Was it used for other purposes? If so, what purposes?

Perhaps the minister might also take the opportunity to address the statement she made in a parliamentary answer to a colleague's question on the availability of qualified lung transplant surgeons in Scotland a couple of weeks ago: that there are no such surgeons in the country. How does the minister reconcile that answer with the comments of Professor David Wheatley, founder of the heart transplant unit and professor of cardiac surgery at the University of Glasgow, who stated that four of the consultant cardiac surgeons currently employed within North Glasgow University Hospitals NHS Trust had relatively recent specialist training in heart and heart-lung transplantation.

Who is correct—the minister or Professor Wheatley? Do we or do we not have surgeons in Scotland who are capable of heart-lung transplantation? That, as the minister knows, is crucial for the future viability of the unit.

Thanks to the efforts of the fourth estate and the statements made over the past few days by Professor Wheatley, we now know that the situation at the transplant unit worsened considerably last summer when, despite the protestations of the trust's management to the contrary, the sole surgeon at the unit was asking for another surgeon to be appointed. That was denied. The bitter irony is that a surgeon who had completed his training and who wanted to be appointed as a consultant at the Glasgow unit is now a consultant at the Freeman hospital in Newcastle and will probably find himself carrying out heart transplants on patients sent from Glasgow.

Was the Minister for Health and Community Care informed of the situation last summer? If she was, what action did she take then? If she was not informed, why not? The surgeon in question was told categorically that he had no chance of a permanent job in Glasgow. Who are we to believe—the trust, which says it has advertised in vain for 18 months, or a clearly committed surgeon?

We have to question the trust's statements on its actions when yesterday in the press we read that the three surgeons who will form the new transplant team after training at the Freeman

"got together last year when the transplant service's problems were becoming apparent and drafted a proposal to become involved".

They said that they

"have not been impressed by the way it has all been handled."

Will the minister tell us why, given the situation described by the three surgeons, the trust has apparently been having so much difficulty recruiting replacements? Will she accept that when, last summer, those three surgeons made their offer to become involved they were available and that if their offer had been taken up we would today have a fully functioning heart transplant unit in Scotland, rather than having to wait another year before transplant operations can resume at the Glasgow unit?

To come to what is already known and accepted as fact, since January this year heart transplant surgery in Scotland has been suspended. That is a fact we all now know but that was kept quiet for the past five months. Again I have to ask the minister, was she informed of the situation? If she was, what action did she take? If she was not, as the health minister directly responsible for that national unit, why not?

To give the minister the benefit of the doubt, I ask why, with a clear 18 months of growing crisis in Scotland's heart transplant unit, it took her until 8 May to issue an ultimatum instructing the trust to present an action plan in two days. In the circumstances, that decision seems woefully late and appears to have been little more than an attempt to be seen to be doing something. That poses another question that the minister must answer today. It is now clear that even though the decision to suspend heart transplant surgery in Scotland was taken in Glasgow in January this year, GPs were not told—they still have to be told—staff have been left in the dark and, most disgracefully, the patients whose lives depend on the unit have had to rely on the newspapers for information.

Given Scotland's appalling record of coronary heart disease, we require a commitment from the minister today that, irrespective of the review of transplant services in England and Wales, heart transplant surgery will continue to be available in Scotland to Scottish patients.

I move,

That the Parliament agrees that Scotland urgently needs a fully functioning and well-maintained and staffed heart transplant unit.