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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Jackie Doyle-Price)
I join all colleagues in thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) for bringing this important subject forward for debate. She has brought to it her characteristic good sense and made her case extremely well. I join colleagues in paying tribute to her work as a Minister. I must say that I had to work with her regularly when she was Minister for Disabled People and I miss her terribly, but if today is anything to go by, I am sure she will keep me busy from her position on the Back Benches, and I thank her for that.
I thank all hon. Members who have participated today, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Douglas Ross), who brought his perspective as a new parent. If he will forgive my saying so, as he was articulating some of the things he learned, it brought home to me how new parents can be a bit like rabbits caught in headlights, thinking, “Oh my goodness, I’ve got this fragile thing, what am I to do?” Again, that brings home the need for parents to feel confident in looking after their newborns.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) gave a forensic exposition of the risks children face, and reminded us that we are equipping people with good, common-sense practical skills for things that can happen to anybody. She made her arguments extremely well. It is always a pleasure to listen to the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden); again, he brought the subject to life beautifully with his own experience and spoke excellent common sense.
I am surprised to hear that the hon. Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper) is a grandmother, but that probably explains why she speaks from such a well-informed perspective. I am glad that she shared Leanne’s story, because it was a perfect example of how going through a course made that parent feel confident about how to deal with a child in distress, and helped her to understand exactly what the condition in front of her was.
Faced with such evidence, we can only do more to spread the news to parents that it is a good idea to equip themselves with first aid skills. From an NHS perspective, as the hon. Lady mentioned, if parents know more about their children’s conditions, there will be fewer visits to A&E and fewer visits to GPs, and that will make the NHS more effective. In a sense, what is not to like?
There are many providers of such products in the market. We have heard about St John Ambulance, the Red Cross and other local providers, and I would not want to favour one or other of them, beyond highlighting that those courses are available, as well as material on the NHS app. I hear what the hon. Lady says—that that is no substitute—but I tend to see these things as complementary. Today’s new parents are of the smartphone generation and want to access material via apps, and we must ensure that we have a good spread of information available to parents.
The death of any child is a tragedy, and the more we can do to support people to be the best possible parents, the better, because it is vital to the longer-term outcomes for the health and life chances of their children. I know my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth brought her experience from her campaign to raise awareness of sepsis, which she referred to in her speech. Sepsis is a silent killer, and probably one of the most preventable causes of death, if we can identify it quickly enough. It is important that we continue to raise awareness so that people, and particularly parents, can spot the signs of sepsis and make decisions and interventions that will help sufferers.
Reference has been made to where we have these interventions and who can give new parents advice on first aid. I see midwives and health visitors as being on the frontline of doing that. My hon. Friend the Member for Moray explained that antenatal period when we are building a relationship and lapping up the information. The trust parents have in midwives and health visitors is a special relationship and presents a powerful opportunity for us to make an intervention to improve health outcomes for all. I see them as the cornerstone of ensuring that parents have the knowledge and skills they need before, during and after their baby’s birth, and that they have access to all the information they need.
There is information on the NHS website with tips for new parents, including information on the signs of a serious illness in a baby or toddler, but it is important that health visitors talk through common conditions with parents. It is a question of confidence; it is about making parents feel confident that they know what is happening to their child and that they can do their best to help them.
That was brought home by the account my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth gave of Rowena’s story and the fact that Rowena felt able to take someone’s child and help them because she had had that grounding. Such things can obviously go the other way, and none of us wants to be in the position of thinking, “What if?” or, “If only”. There is clearly every reason to encourage as widespread training in first aid as is possible.
My hon. Friend has a simple ask: she wishes the Government to fund a pilot project to generate evidence for a further roll-out of the project she has witnessed locally in Cornwall. The National Institute for Health Research welcomes funding applications for research into any aspect of human health, and any application will of course be judged in the normal way. Awards are made on the basis of the importance of the topic to patients and health and care services, value for money and scientific quality, so I encourage her and the team she is working with to apply for such a grant so that we can, as she says, demonstrate that the training has an impact on outcomes and provides better value for money for the NHS. It seems to me to speak for itself, but I encourage her to go through that process.
Julie Cooper
Can the Minister assure us that, if funding is achieved for such a pilot and the training is shown to be beneficial, the Government will commit to universal provision?
Jackie Doyle-Price
That will come down to the evidence base. The hon. Lady raised some questions about prevention in her speech. Following the long-term plan, we are working up our wider proposals for prevention, and we see interventions in the early years and childhood as extremely important, so we will look at what measures we need to take in that context. At this stage, I am not able to commit to universal provision of a particular product, but we need to look at how we can best equip parents with the tools to look after their children as well as they possibly can.
Every parent wants their child to stay safe. Frankly, my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham scared me to death with the risks she highlighted, because they illustrate just how easily any one of us could fall victim to an accident, and for a child that is especially the case. We know that unintentional injuries are one of the main causes of premature death and illness for children in England. To put a figure on that, every year in England 55 children under the age of five die from injuries in and around the home, which is 7% of all deaths of children aged one to four. That is pretty stark. We can factor on to that the 370,000 visits to A&E departments and 40,000 emergency hospital admissions in England each year because of accidents at home among under-fives.
Preventing accidents is part of Public Health England’s priority of giving children and young people the best start in life, and is an area to focus on. I was struck by the reference to choking, because that is a situation where knowing what we are doing can be the difference between life and death; by the time an ambulance has been called, it will be too late. There is much more that we need to do to educate people on how to deal with a child who is choking, because it is something that can happen to any child. We have all seen children excited and gobbling their food down, and with that obviously comes the attendant risk.
As I mentioned, health visitors are accessible to all parents and provide a trusted source of knowledge, advice and information. I want to make sure that we take full advantage of health visitors in that space. Through our work on early years, we are looking at what more we can do to support them, to make the most of that intervention. I am confident that if we make better use of that workforce, we can take a lot of action in this area, not least because parents find engaging with their health visitor less intimidating than they perhaps find medical professionals or anyone else; it is a relationship built up in the home. Health visitors are also the part of the scheme that deals not only with mum but with dad and the rest of the family as well, which is so important. Health visitors lead and support the delivery of preventive programmes for infants and children from nought to five years old through the healthy child programme, including by giving regular advice on accident prevention and links to wider community resources.
Julie Cooper
Does that mean that the Minister is committed to restoring the number of health visitors?
Jackie Doyle-Price
The hon. Lady will be aware that there has been a fall in the number of health visitors, following a peak in 2015. I am extremely committed to making sure that we have an ample supply of health visitors, because they are on the frontline of early intervention; they are an army. She will know that the NHS long-term plan, recognising that local authorities have borne the brunt of fiscal discipline in this area, explicitly says that we will strengthen the relationship between the NHS and local authorities in this space, because that is clearly good for health outcomes. I hope that that reassures the hon. Lady.
I could go on for much longer, Mr Hollobone, but I do not want to stretch your indulgence unduly. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth for all her work on this matter and on raising awareness of sepsis. We will continue to co-operate in this area. I can tell her that Public Health England very much has this area on its radar, in terms of giving advice to parents on how best to look after their children. We will continue to work with the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health to establish a single, England-wide paediatric early warning system to improve the recognition and response of healthcare services to deteriorating children or young people across England in primary and community care, including in the ambulance service and hospitals. Information and advice to help parents recognise and respond to signs and symptoms of ill health are freely available.
We must continue to champion and promote this cause. I thank midwives and health visitors for their tremendous work—they play such an important role in this—as well as providers of first aid courses. I look forward to engaging with my hon. Friend further on this matter.