Ensuring we have good health services locally is a key part of an MPs role. Core to the checks and balances is the Care Quality Commission (CQC), ensuring standards are maintained across the country. Inspections highlight both failings and successes and can result in measures being put in place to help a failing or troubled trust, as we have seen with the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust. But for specific concerns about treatment, a complaints system is available to service users who feel they have been let down.

Ultimately, of course, people can contact their MP and it is certainly the case that we get a reasonable flow of concerns about the NHS. In my constituency office, we take a great deal of care about concerns that are raised by patients, or family, regarding failings in care.

Of course, no MP is in the position to be able to hold their own enquiry into an event or complaint. A fair enquiry needs experts, evidence, both sides of the argument and someone who can adjudicate. MPs have neither the resources nor the power to do that. However, we can spot trends, and ensure that the processes in place for complaints are working properly. Importantly that both lessons are learnt from errors, and that those lessons are acted upon. We have a hot line to the CQC and we ultimately have the Parliamentary Ombudsman to examine detailed issues.

Alongside those issues raised by patients are those raised by whistle-blowers. This has always been an area of contention – one man’s raised concerns may be seen as another’s vexatious back-stabbing. Again, MPs can only take a layman’s judgement on this and that is why we have worked with the acute trust to appoint an independent Whistle-Blower champion, to help whistle blowers make their case in safety. Whistle blowers raising legitimate concerns today may save lives tomorrow.

Every piece of information that comes to my office helps build a picture of the NHS in the county. That is why we take is so seriously. But it is also important that we see both sides of the coin. Please let me know if you have been badly treated by the NHS, but please also let me know if you have been treated well. There are many, many people working hard to deliver a good service and we all need to know – and celebrate - what best practice looks like, not just where it goes wrong.