Over the past few months, I’ve been appalled to hear from constituents about some terrible failures of NHS Continuing Healthcare. This includes a terminally ill 21 year old man who needed a new care package at home after 10 weeks in hospital but ended up being discharged without the right support; an elderly man with Alzheimer’s who was left wet overnight when staff failed to change his incontinence pads; and a vulnerable dementia patient whose funding was withdrawn and given four days notice to pay up or leave his care home.

In our area, the Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit (GEM) is responsible for NHS Continuing Healthcare. GEM is brand new quango which was created as a direct result of the Government’s damaging NHS re-organisation.

On Thursday 8 May, I called for GEM to be sacked from its role; for a single, named, accountable person to be put in charge; and for the Government, whose NHS reorganisation created this mess, to apologise to the families concerned. You can read coverage of this story on BBC East Midlands, the Mercury, and the Guardian.