Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment. As a Minister, I, too, had responsibility for the NPSA and I was responsible when we introduced the reporting system. It is easy to forget how difficult it was to secure agreement across the NHS to that reporting system. There was a great deal of nervousness about it and it has certainly taken time to build up the confidence, across the country, that ensures that most service providers are now engaged with reporting these incidents. If we put that reporting system under a powerful body that is responsible for commissioning, there is a real danger about maintaining the support for the level of reporting that we have achieved. There is a risk that, without a few more safeguards in the arrangements, we may see a dropping off in the reporting of those incidents. Providers will be nervous about how commissioners will interpret the reporting of those incidents. That is the nub of the issue. I think we have a real problem about how we can carry on building on the good work done by the NPSA on that reporting system and ensuring that we continue to give confidence to the NHS to report these incidents in the service of the greater good. I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say about protecting the gains that we have made so far in this area.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I speak in support of what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Warner. There is real anxiety that people will be frightened to admit to and report errors, if they feel that that could threaten, in any way, the contracting of the service that they are working in. Who in the new system will be responsible for rolling out training that has come from the cataloguing and analysis of problems, and how will the lessons learnt in devolved nations be fed into the system for the UK as a whole. Indeed, how will lessons learnt in England be fed out to the devolved nations?

[Lord Patel]

My Lords, I speak as somebody who has been involved with the National Patient Safety Agency for longer than the noble Lord, Lord Warner, as a Minister, or the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, as its chairman, as I chaired it for four years. What is important is that the National Patient Safety Agency, as it is currently, has been unable to be effective. It has not been effective because it is not mandatory to adopt, implement or use the learning produced from the reports it receives from all healthcare providers on systems failures that may cause harm to patients. I hope that the Minister will reassure us that whatever the new arrangements are, the learning produced from systems failures will be implemented, or will be expected to be implemented.

I do not know whether the Commissioning Board is the ideal place for it—I understand that it is taking over the group that looked after the analysis of the reports. Therefore, it will be its task to disseminate all the learning that comes from it. The actual collection of information or data will be outsourced on a contractual basis to Imperial College. Perhaps the Minister will comment on that. The important issues are that the information on systems failure is collected and that the lessons learnt are available to all those who commission and provide healthcare. They must be implemented.