Health Research

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Wednesday 12th February 2025

(1 week, 2 days ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

The noble Lord makes an important point. Decisions made by other countries, including the United States, are a matter for them. As the noble Lord said, if this goes ahead—I have made comments on a lawsuit, so I am limited in what I can say—while the US is indeed one of the UK’s closest partners in this area, we will seek every opportunity internationally and continue our commitment to see research at the heart of our NHS into the future.

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- Hansard - -

My Lords, as my ally the noble Lord, Lord Patel, rightly says, uncertainties in the United States with health funding presents an opportunity for the United Kingdom. The research funded by the MRC alone led to spin-out companies which created value of more than £6.1 billion, 3,800 jobs and £10.2 billion of external investment. Will the Minister and her department commit to campaigning for ongoing research and investment through what will be an uncertain and difficult SR for health and medical research?

Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

As we move towards the 10-year plan, it will be key. Research, the contribution of life sciences and innovation will help us deliver an NHS that is fit for the future. I agree with the noble Baroness about the major contribution that is made to the UK economy. This is not just about healthcare, important though that is; it is also about growth. There are some 6,800 businesses generating more than £100 billion in turnover. Life sciences is one of the most dynamic and significant sectors. It drives economic growth, but it also provides a future in terms of the quality, availability and efficiency of the healthcare that we can provide in this country.

Women’s Health Strategy

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Tuesday 4th February 2025

(2 weeks, 3 days ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

We continue to learn from the best. I am committed to speaking with the leadership of ICBs about the importance of women’s health hubs, not least because it is about improving women’s healthcare. Having visited a women’s health hub myself, I can testify to the points that the noble Baronesses have made. However, I gently repeat that we need to look not just in the planning guidance but in the elective reform plan, which states about the NHS that:

“In gynaecology we will support … innovative models offering patients care closer to home”.


That is exemplified by the women’s health hub. The Neighbourhood Health Guidelines, published just last week, include women’s health hubs as an example of a neighbourhood health model.

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - -

My Lords, the history of health policy through successive Governments has been one of too many priorities and targets which are not delivered, so I support the Government in this analysis. It has also been one of poorer outcomes for women and minorities. Given the shift in leadership from the Department of Health and others, how will the Government ensure better outcomes for women and minorities? How will those be monitored? Will they intervene early if they do not see that direction of travel?

Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

I thank the noble Baroness for her welcome for the new approach in the planning guidance. As she commented, and as noble Lords opposite will know, just because something is in the guidance does not mean that it will happen. For example, despite targets for A&E performance or ambulance response times being written into planning, they were not delivered. This is not where we want to be. We will continue to work with NHS England; for example, to ensure that women’s health is key. I should also emphasise that, as we move towards the 10-year health plan, women’s health will feature not as an adjunct but run throughout.

Anti-depressants: Cost, Risks and Ramifications

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Wednesday 11th December 2024

(2 months, 1 week ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

I would be very pleased to write further to the noble Baroness. This is a very important point about support for women during the menopause. However, a prescription is made only after discussion with the patient about it and other alternatives, and the clinician has to follow and comply with the guidelines. Patient choice is absolutely key here. Every individual is an individual, and only what is appropriate should be prescribed—if needed.

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - -

My Lords, as the Minister pointed out, SSRIs can be the right choice for some patients, but for there to be patient choice, there has to be the capacity for those therapeutic options. In April 2024, around 1 million people were recorded as waiting for mental health services, 340,000 of whom were children, and over 100,000 had waited for more than a year. The Government have pledged to provide an additional 8,500 mental health staff. Can the Minister say what she will do to increase patient choice and build that capacity?

Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

We have already made a number of commitments, but the noble Baroness is quite right to observe the excessive numbers on the waiting list. We are deeply aware of the distress and continuing difficulty that this causes for many. The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, in his independent investigation, confirmed that about 1 million people are waiting for mental health support as of April 2024. Moving to the 10-year plan will be an opportunity to put mental health services in a different place. In addition to the commitments that the noble Baroness has mentioned, we are providing access to a specialist mental health professional in every school and providing open-access Young Futures hubs.

Drug-related Deaths in England and Wales

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Tuesday 26th November 2024

(2 months, 3 weeks ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - -

My Lords, the two-year review of the LGA’s 10-year drugs plan has made a number of recommendations to improve the response. On the question of synthetic drugs, it recommended the implementation of early-warning systems so that changes at street level can be responded to in real time and samples of new substances can be tested as soon as possible. Can the Minister please look into those recommendations and see what support can be provided by the Government?

Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

I will indeed be doing that, not least because our work with other departments continues to take account of the early warning to which the noble Baroness refers. That is in respect of the threat of synthetic opioids, which we know is extremely real and pressing.

Pharmacies: Rural Areas

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Tuesday 10th September 2024

(5 months, 1 week ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

I am pleased to say that, as I am sure the noble Lord is aware, prescribing pilots are going on in NHS England. These will look at what more pharmacies could do in this regard, in particular asking whether more minor illnesses could be dealt with, and whether the long-term management of conditions could be better managed through pharmacies. We will be very interested in what those pilots come up with. They are across the entire country, so will of course include rural areas. This is something that we will want to ensure is available in rural and urban environments.

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - -

My Lords, the Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee pharmacy inquiry found that, while most medicines are in good supply, medicines shortages have doubled since 2021. This means that pharmacists spend time dealing with medicines shortages every day—some as much as four and a half hours. The committee recommended an independent review into how to improve resilience of the medicines supply chain, including looking at pharmacists’ prescribing. Will the Minister commit to this, and if not, what will she do to improve the situation?

Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

The noble Baroness makes a good point about the shortage of medicines; this has been raised many times in your Lordships’ House. I will ensure that my colleague Ministers are aware of the points raised today, to build these into our consideration of how we support pharmacists and pharmacies to continue to do a good job and, indeed, expand their remit.

NHS Blood and Transplant Service: Blood Stocks

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Tuesday 30th July 2024

(6 months, 3 weeks ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

The noble Baroness is absolutely right that we need to encourage young people to come forward and to stay in the system. I have been in discussion with the chief executive and the chair of the service about how we can build more resilience and extend the number of donors. I am sure noble Lords will be pleased to know that, with the assistance of the actors Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds, there is an exciting partnership with the Disney action film “Deadpool & Wolverine”, which is exactly intended to reach new and younger donors, and donors of black heritage. I am sure it will.

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - -

My Lords, I declare my interest as former chair of the Human Tissue Authority. I understand that this alert was in part triggered by the cyberattack, and that Synnovis has largely stabilised the system for wider testing, but can the Minister say when the system will be wholly stabilised for blood transfusions? Can she also say whether any backlog has been created as a result of the cyberattack and what steps will be taken to create resilience so this cannot happen again?

Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

The noble Baroness is right in her observations. What I can say is that, while there has been a dramatic and somewhat sustained increase in the need for O-group blood, that is now improving. There has not been a negative effect on elective surgery; I think that is an important reassurance. In the future, obviously cyberattacks are going to be something that we are going to have to always be mindful of. That is why the service, at my request, is working to come up with plans for greater resilience, and such work is already ongoing within the department and across government.

NHS: Long-term Sustainability

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Thursday 18th April 2024

(10 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- Hansard - -

My Lords, I declare my interests as chair of Genomics England and Oxford University Innovation and a board member of BioNTech. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who is an eternal champion of the NHS and a great expert in these matters. I am grateful to him for convening today’s important debate.

As time is short, I will focus on the role of genomic technologies in future-proofing the NHS. From Crick, Watson and Franklin discovering the double helix structure to the Human Genome Project, the UK has long been at the forefront of genomic discovery. With the 100,000 Genomes Project we did something quite different—we drove that discovery into the heart of the clinic for patient benefit. Today Genomics England hosts the largest clinical whole-genome dataset in the world. Recruitment of this cohort was complete in 2018 but analysis is still ongoing, increasing the diagnostic yield all the time. In rare diseases this is over 30% and rising, while in some individual conditions, such as cystic renal disease, it is over 60%.

Each of these diagnoses is a life changed. One 10 year-old girl was admitted to intensive care with a life-threatening condition. It turned out that she had been undiagnosed with a rare condition for over 7 years with more than 300 secondary care episodes, costing the NHS over £350,000 to date. It took whole-genome sequencing to uncover a genetic deficiency and provide her and her family with a diagnosis at last, ending her diagnostic odyssey. Moreover, a bone marrow transplant proved curative. From sequencing to treatment in her case cost £70,000, just 20% of her pre-diagnosis healthcare costs. This sounds like an edge case, but rare disease patients have an average of 67 appointments over 75 months before diagnosis. For many patients this diagnostic odyssey is much longer.

That is why Genomics England was founded—to use the power of genomics to do better. Our aim is to change the fundamentals of healthcare delivery. We want to create a virtuous cycle by making genomics routine in the NHS and supporting frontier genomic research and discovery, and to continually replenish one of the richest genomic datasets in the world. In doing this we will create a return for participants through better diagnostics and therapeutics; a return for the NHS by boosting productivity and efficiency through stratification, screening and early intervention; and a return for the UK by increasing R&D investment and clinical innovation.

Genomics England now enables the NHS to deliver the world’s first nationwide whole-genome sequencing service for more than 190 clinical conditions across rare diseases and cancers. The service has supported more than 90,000 patients since its launch at the end of 2020 and is scaling fast. We ask patients for a specific consent to use their data for research purposes. Over 95% agree, and their data is stored in the National Genomic Research Library to enable cutting-edge research. The findings of that are then driven back into the clinic to improve NHS care. This means that the Genomics England structure is inherently translational by design; the heart of our mission is to drive long-term, sustainable improvements in the care of our participants and in the NHS as a whole.

We see research and clinical results flowing all the time: research at Great Ormond Street for children with blood cancers found that whole-genome sequencing was proven to provide additional information for diagnosis in 81% of cases, it changed the management of condition in 24% in cases, and it reclassified diagnosis in 14% of cases. Meanwhile, baby Oliver in Cambridge was born with a 6-centimetre tumour on his leg. Under the microscope it looked like an infantile fibrosarcoma and the standard testing was inconclusive, but with whole-genome sequencing it was confirmed as a benign myofibroma. This meant that baby Oliver was spared chemotherapy and surgery and is now happy and healthy.

We know that over the next decade data, analytics and genomics will transform healthcare by enabling personalised medicine. This means more effective and tailored treatments, better diagnostics and predicting disease susceptibility so that we can intervene earlier— possibly even preventing disease altogether. Earlier intervention and more targeted treatment not only improve patient outcomes but reduce the huge healthcare costs of ineffective treatments and side-effects. Multimodal genomic data that we are building now have the potential to cut the costs of drug development and improve population health management.

That is why at Genomics England we have launched three programmes designed to push the envelope of genomic medicine further into the clinic. We are diversifying the ancestry of genomes to improve equitable outcomes for patients; validating long-read and multimodal cancer technologies to drive earlier and more accurate diagnostics for cancer patients; and our Generation Study, a newborn screening pilot, is designed to end the diagnostic odyssey where it starts and explore options for supporting genomic-enabled prevention. The potential of genomics is immense, but to fully harness its power we must continue to invest in research, infrastructure and education to realise its full potential and truly make the NHS sustainable.

Sodium Valproate and Pelvic Mesh

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Monday 25th March 2024

(10 months, 3 weeks ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Markham Portrait Lord Markham (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

We have completed four of the initial recommendations in the report of my noble friend Lady Cumberlege, and another three are in process. The most important of those, to answer the noble Baroness’s question, is the setting up of these nine specialist centres which can provide the support needed, not just in terms of redress surgically or treatment-wise but in terms of the support that people need to help them cope with the issues.

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - -

My Lords, as important as this report and these findings are, this is part of a wider problem. Some 4,000 babies die due to pregnancy-specific conditions in the UK every year, but 73% of drugs given to pregnant women have no safety information. That is clearly unacceptable. The Minister knows that I have raised this issue with him before; please can he give an update on progress towards putting this right?

Lord Markham Portrait Lord Markham (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

My noble friend is correct on this. Probably the best way to do that is to come back in detail in writing, because it is vitally important.

NHS: Neurology Care

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Monday 26th February 2024

(11 months, 3 weeks ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Markham Portrait Lord Markham (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

I echo the noble Baroness’s comments regarding Lord Cormack.

In terms of the long-term workforce plan, I was talking this morning to the national clinical lead in this area and to Professor Steve Powis. The next stage in terms of the detail is looking at the individual specialties and neuroscience experts are part of that. In the last five years, we have seen an increase of about 20% or so in this space but understanding that need going forward is the next stage in the long-term workforce plan.

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - -

My Lords, I echo the comments about Lord Cormack—we are all going to miss him dreadfully in this Chamber.

There are about 600,000 people in the UK living with epilepsy. An epileptic seizure can cause significant disability and, in the worst instances, death. Only half of those living with epilepsy are seizure free, but this could rise to 70% if all those with epilepsy were targeted to the right treatments. Can the Minister say what plans the department has to improve epileptic treatment in the UK with improved specialist care?

Lord Markham Portrait Lord Markham (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

I thank my noble friend, and I proudly wear the Epilepsy Action badge from the meeting I was just at. As my noble friend says, it is all about trying to get that early diagnosis. If you can get that and help people get the right treatments, that is exactly the right direction of travel because it can make a huge difference to outcomes. The progressive neurological condition toolkit I mentioned earlier sets out that pathway and the model of integrated care for all the ICBs, which they will all then be held to account on to make sure patients with all these conditions—and there are 600 of them including epilepsy—are getting the right treatment in their neighbourhood.

Adult Social Care

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts
Wednesday 22nd November 2023

(1 year, 2 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Markham Portrait Lord Markham (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

The noble Lord is absolutely correct that the flow through the hospital is vital to A&E and other wait times. That is why we have announced things such as the virtual ward: the 10,000 beds are designed to get people out of the hospital and into a care environment where they still feel supported, thereby using technology to help take the strain. The point about this year, and the whole reason why we announced the £600 million extra investment over the summer, is that we learned the lessons of the previous year, recognising that the earlier we can get this money to the local authorities, the better they can spend it to put the provision in place.

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Portrait Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - -

My Lords, investment is welcome but reform is also vital. The NAO’s autumn report noted that my noble friend’s department ended its charging reform programme board and

“has not established an overarching programme to coordinate”

reform activity. It is instead delivering reform

“through a series of 27 projects which report to the director-general … via nine separate programme boards”.

Can my noble friend investigate this to see if there could be better co-ordination of reform to ensure that it is delivered more effectively?

Lord Markham Portrait Lord Markham (Con)
- View Speech - Hansard - - - Excerpts

My noble friend is correct, in that having so many local authority and private sector providers means it is a confusing space in which to bring all this together. The People at the Heart of Care White Paper is trying to co-ordinate that and at the same time provide a career structure, because we know that the bedrock of all this is the staffing, and this needs to be an attractive space for people to work in. Therefore, giving them that recognised, transferable qualification which they can take into nursing and other areas as needed is vital in ensuring that we have the workforce to underpin this.