UK NEWS

MIDWIVES DELIVER HUMILIATING REBUFF TO HEALTH MINISTER

Patricia Hewitt

Thursday May 24,2007

By Victoria Fletcher

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THE FUTURE of the Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt looked increasingly uncertain last night as key NHS reforms came under fire.

The embattled minister was attacked on all fronts amid demands for her resignation.

Ms Hewitt got a hostile reception from midwives when she told their conference that maternity units must close.

Moments later her shake-up of junior doctors’ training was described by a High Court judge as a “dreadful mess.”
The double whammy came just hours after Tony Blair refused to say if she should keep her job under Gordon Brown – which led Tory leader David Cameron to suggest she was being “hung out to dry”.

Last night, critics said that if she wouldn’t resign, she must be sacked. Andrew Lansley, shadow health secretary said her failures had led to a crisis.

He said: “Patricia Hewitt has presided over serial failures of management in the NHS. There is no confidence in her leadership, either inside the Department of Health or across the NHS. From being barracked by nurses to a vote of no confidence from doctors, it is clear she has to go.

“The NHS needs new leadership. It needs a new government, but if we can’t yet provide that, at the very least it must have a new health secretary.” Ms Hewitt’s bad day began when she spoke at the Royal College of Midwives conference in Brighton.

Angry midwives listened to her defend plans for a shake-up in maternity units which could see many closed down in favour of sending mothers further afield to give birth.

In the High Court Mr Justice Goldring threw out an application from doctors calling for the Government training scheme MTAS to be scrapped. But he said it didn’t mean some junior doctors “do not have an entirely justifiable sense of grievance.”

He said: “The premature introduction of MTAS has had disastrous consequences. It was a flawed system.” Dr Jo Hilborne, chairman of the BMA junior doctors committee, said: “There are 12,000 doctors who will not get training posts through this system, and they must be our priority.”

Later, a motion of no confidence in Ms Hewitt failed in the Commons where she was accused of having “no credibility left.” The vote was not passed after ministerial colleagues packed the front benches to support her.