Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

50A: Clause 22, page 18, line 15, at end insert—
“( ) In discharging its duty under subsection (1), in relation to specialised services, the Board must exercise its functions in accordance with current NICE guidance.”

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, we come to another group of amendments that relate to the Commissioning Board. These are three separate amendments but they are grouped together because they all relate to the functioning of the board.

The first, Amendment 50A, aims to embed quality and good practice in services while eliminating unacceptable variations in standards of specialist services by ensuring that the NHS Commissioning Board conducts its functions in accordance with NICE guidance. Unfortunately, we know that NICE guidance is not being observed as widely as one would hope. The amendment has been particularly strongly supported by the Neurological Alliance and a lot of other groups representing patients with less common conditions, which feel that their services are not necessarily as good as they should be.

I shall give some examples from neurology. If epilepsy is suspected, the NICE guidance currently says that these patients should be assessed by a specialist, but 49 per cent of acute trusts have none. The guidance says that they should be seen urgently within two weeks but 90 per cent of patients are not seen within that timeframe. It says that they should have access to an epilepsy nurse but 60 per cent of acute trusts do not have one. With regard to multiple sclerosis, a relatively common condition across the country, 56 per cent of the 89 MS centres are multidisciplinary; the remainder are not. One-third of Parkinson’s patients are waiting longer for diagnosis than the NICE guidance suggests that they should.

Unfortunately, some pathfinder commissioning groups have vocalised that they do not see a need for specialist services and indeed that they are not following NICE guidance. That is why the amendment is worded as it is, with the phrase,

“in relation to specialised services”.

It may seem as if that is superfluous to the wording already in the Bill, but I have worded it in that way to bring a focus on to specialised services.

NICE is an independent way of establishing the evidence for best practice, and its appraisals are widely recognised around the world as being of a high standard and setting high standards. It also provides a basis on which services can be accredited. There are clinical guidelines and services can be audited so that they can be assessed on the standard that they are providing. That allows quality outcomes and patient outcomes to be measured.

Amendment 63A relates to commissioning for conditions that are less common. This amendment in particular has very wide support. Quite apart from neurological disease, there are patients with haematological diseases such as sickle cell or haemophilia, conditions that are affecting children and young people into early adulthood. These patients need to be able to access services rapidly, wherever they are living. These services become part of the general haematological services available where they are, but they have to be provided to a high standard. In the past we had a tragedy with patients with haemophilia, and we see the problem of patients with sickle cell who are not appropriately treated and as a result have much more damage than they might otherwise have. There is also a risk of the inappropriate prescription of analgesics at the wrong time and at the wrong dose, which can result in long-term dependency without establishing good pain control, whereas during the acute crisis patients have terrible pain and need adequate treatment. Sadly, some of these young people have been labelled as being addicted because the severity of their pain has not been recognised.

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I hope that I have said enough to persuade the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

I am most grateful to the Minister and to everyone who has spoken in this debate. There has been widespread support around the House for this group of amendments. The Minister’s comments on NICE were reassuring and very helpful. We will be returning to less common conditions in relation to clinical commissioning groups, but I feel that we have teased out the very difficult dilemma of the duties that sit with the Commissioning Board versus those that sit with the local clinical commissioning group and how that division and integration work.

Again, in terms of emergency care, the Minister has made very many helpful comments. However, I do have some concerns that I would like to consult on. It would be really helpful if he would meet me and some people from emergency medicine. The College of Emergency Medicine has been trying very hard to work with the Government to make sure that this Bill actually does enhance and does not damage inadvertently the improvements in emergency care that it has been driving across the country very fast over recent years. A meeting would be most helpful. Pending such a meeting, I will withdraw the amendment for the moment, but we may need to come back to some of this at Third Reading, so I would like to reserve that. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 50A withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

57: Clause 22, page 18, line 39, at end insert—
“( ) The National Commissioning Board must have regard to advice from a range of healthcare practitioners from across the patient pathway, including local clinical specialists and allied health professionals.”

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, this is another group of amendments that relate to the process of commissioning. Their aim is to ensure that commissioners have regard to all the expert advice needed to make informed decisions about commissioning services for patients, particularly complex services that operate across the care pathway. Amendment 65, which is primarily in the name of my noble friend Lord Patel, further aims to ensure that safety information is shared with everybody who needs to know about it.

The groups of particular concern to be consulted go beyond medicine and nursing; the wording in the amendment is “local clinical specialists”. They will be linked to their own specialist group and specialist society and will be expected to be completely up to date with advances in their field, enabling the most modern, up-to-date and cost-effective care to be brought down to a local level. They also address allied health professionals.

We have spoken remarkably little about the contribution of allied health professionals in our debates so far, and they have not featured on the face of the Bill. Physiotherapists form the largest group of allied health professionals. I declare an interest as president of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy. As a group, they are very used to representing other allied health professionals; and, as a group , allied health professionals are very used to understanding the role and contribution of each other, such as occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and so on, groups that are small in number but have a very important contribution to make. One of the reasons that they become so important in these new processes of a care pathway is that, if we are expecting more patients to be looked after in the community, we have to do a great deal to increase the independence of individuals.

The physiotherapists and occupational therapists are par excellence the people who will maintain or re-establish mobility and be able to discharge patients from hospital. I know from my own clinical practice that all too often we are waiting for the physio or the OT to provide the essential input that makes the difference between a patient remaining an in-patient or being able to get home, particularly where they have mobility problems. Physiotherapists also have a role in mental health and can be very important in establishing mental health improvements as well as just physical health. It is with that background that they have been featured in these amendments as a group of allied health professionals, because, sadly, many doctors and nurses do not really understand the major and very cost-effective contribution that these healthcare professionals can make. I beg to move.

[Lord Patel]

My Lords, I shall speak to two amendments in my name, Amendments 65 and 66. They are very simple. They regard the information on the safety of services provided by the health service. I particularly want to address the issue about patient safety.

Amendment 65 refers to the information provided. The Bill says that the Commissioning Board will provide information to those whom it “considers appropriate”. I do not know why the Commissioning Board must decide who it considers appropriate; my amendment merely lists all the organisations providing healthcare to whom the information must be provided. Patient safety incidents occur mainly because of systems failure. I can give many examples, from wrong-side surgery to wrong infusions, wrong medicines reconciliation and wrong injections in the wrong side—such as a spinal injection when a particular material must not be injected spinally. Because it is a system failure, if such a patient safety incident occurs in one hospital, it is likely to occur in another. So the information must be provided to all healthcare providers and those who train doctors and nurses. I do not understand why it must be that the board must make information collected on patient safety incidents available only to those whom it “considers appropriate”.

My next amendment has to do with subsection (3), which says:

“The Board may impose charges, calculated on such basis as it considers appropriate, in respect of information made available by it under subsection (2)”.

Why must it charge? If it charges, we do not get the gains from the lessons learnt from patient safety incidents.

The two amendments are quite simple. I do not understand why it is not clearer.

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Amendments 72 and 115 in my name clarify the circumstances in which the board of CCGs must consider common-law confidentiality requirements when considering whether or not to disclose information. We have listened to the views expressed by my noble friend Lord Marks, the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, and the BMA; they drew attention to circumstances where, if common law did not apply, there was the potential for disclosure to threaten patient confidentiality. We are therefore bringing forward these amendments to achieve what we believe is an appropriate balance between ensuring that information is disclosed when appropriate and protecting personal confidential information. The amendments are tabled in my name to achieve this, and I hope that they will receive the support of the House.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for having listened so carefully to the amendments and for having addressed and recognised the real concerns that are behind the way that they were written and drafted. I rather hoped that he was going to say that the spirit of the amendments would be taken forward in guidance for commissioning as it is written, and I pose that as a very brief question to him before completing my comments.

[Earl Howe]

Certainly, my Lords. The spirit of the amendments will be incorporated in guidance.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

I thank the Minister very much. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 57 withdrawn.