NHS: Staff

Baroness Emerton Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Emerton (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Clark, for his introduction. I declare my interests as listed in the register: I am a retired nurse and a retired midwife. I joined the health service in 1953 as a student nurse and I have had a privileged career.

I find it very sad to stand here and talk about the health service we see today. I have read the evidence given to the Health Committee in the Commons and all the up-to-date figures, and I find it extremely worrying and sad that, from a nursing point of view, we are faced with an unsafe situation. We spent four years on the Health and Social Care Bill and emerged with the phrases that the Government would look at safe staffing and the certification of untrained staff.

Fortunately, we have the services of the noble Lord, Lord Willis, who has taken up the cudgel for people who were untrained nurses, and a two-year programme for support workers, agreed by the Government, has been introduced. The question is whether, as nursing associates, they will be registered. The problem is that the NMC is the registering body for the four countries, and not all four countries are doing the same thing with untrained staff. We are in a situation where we have uncertainty.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, raised the question of a multi-professional, multi-Government approach. The health service has reached a crisis point where it needs a global or overseeing way forward. I am particularly interested because during the past year I have had personal experience of health and social care, both as a Member of this House and as a regional nurse. I have had experience of transferring patients from health into social care. We have enormous problems which need to be sorted through a multi-professional, properly funded and reassuring to the public strategy.

We cannot go on having statements. To step forward we need to deliver safe care through the patient pathway, from before life to the end of life. We may need to use volunteers in some aspects—which is very good if they are trained—but the public still expect a service they can trust.

At the moment, there is a situation where people are wondering whether they will get safe care, when they are discharged in the middle of the night to a home where there is no one. We need to see that there is a pathway for them right the way through. I ask the Minister that we take seriously all the information that has come in about shortage of staff—not just nurses but all across the NHS. There is a need to work together and break down barriers that are there. We need more multi-professional education where it would be cost effective. We have not built in cost-effective ways going forward in some instances. Anatomy is anatomy, so why do we do not have anatomy teaching where we have all disciplines coming together? There are all sorts of innovative points we could do.

So, as a disappointed, retired nurse—and retiring Peer in the near future—I ask the Minister that the health service is revived so that patients and the public can have confidence going to a surgery or whatever their need, so that they can be assured that their health will be cared for. I rest my case.