PRETTY well everyone in Buckinghamshire will have been dismayed by the findings of Sir Bruce Keogh’s report into our local hospitals.

If we go to hospital for treatment, we are likely to be ill, frail or worried – in many cases a mixture of all three. We want to have confidence that we, or the relative or friend who has gone in as a patient, will be well-looked after.

As a constituency MP, I do get letters and emails about poor hospital care. There are not huge numbers of these complaints. Far more constituents complain to me about social security benefits, housing and the immigration system than about the NHS.

It’s also right to say that any media story about failures at Wycombe or Stoke Mandeville is almost always followed by a letter from a constituent describing how they got first-class care.

But precisely because people, particularly elderly people, who are in hospital are by definition vulnerable we need to be concerned about any case where the system appears to have failed.

The Keogh Report into the Bucks NHS Trust is worth reading in full. It makes a point of saying that the review team found many examples of really good quality care. But one of the themes of the Report is that the Trust needs to get much better at disseminating best practice – making sure that the commitment, discipline and organisation which is working in some parts of the Trust is applied across the board.

At the moment, that’s not happening. There was some reassurance in the finding that the Trust deserved a ‘green light’ for all the major indicators of patient safety. But against that, I was very concerned by the evidence of serious problems over out-of-hours and weekend care and by inadequate systems for tracking and ensuring consistent treatment for a patient who has to be transferred between different wards or different hospitals.

There are powerful social reasons for keeping acute hospital services at both Wycombe and Aylesbury. At the same time there are compelling clinical reasons to concentrate specialist staff, for example in treating strokes or in dealing with children, in one place and not try to spread them thinly between the two hospitals.

So for a long time ahead it looks as if we’ll see some services at Stoke and others at Wycombe. Patients and their families have a right to expect that if they are transferred between sites or wards, the doctors and nurses who treat them will have up-to-date information about their medical history and will act upon it.

An action plan has now been drawn up to put right the failings that Keogh identified. The local management team will get help and support from another NHS Trust and progress on the action plan will be monitored by the new hospitals inspectorate.

The inspectors will also judge whether the current leadership is able to get the results or whether new people need to be brought in.

I hope that the Trust leadership treats the Keogh Report as a challenge to raise their level of ambition, to put right failings and insist on the highest standards both of management and front-line care. It is in all our interests that they succeed and that we can look to our local hospitals with a sense of confidence and pride.