NHS: Urgent and Emergency Care Review
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, given the urgency of this crisis, what are the Government doing to meet the request from the College of Emergency Medicine that the exit block be urgently addressed, so that other disciplines support emergency medicine consultants in moving patients on from A&E departments out into the community or into in-patient beds if they are not fit enough to be discharged?
Ageing: Public Services and Demographic Change Committee Report
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, it was an enormous privilege to serve on this Select Committee, which was led so elegantly and chaired so well by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin. The report should be a wake-up call to everyone, but we must be careful that the language does not disguise what we are facing. Talk of a demographic time bomb makes it sound as if everybody growing old is a problem, when actually we must harness this fantastic cohort in our population, who are well and living well, but who are not encouraged to contribute adequately back into society, as many want to. We know that 30% of those over 60 volunteer through formal organisations but, sadly, their real skills are often not adequately harnessed. I have just met a group of people, many of whom are retired, who provide accompanying people—doulas—for people at the end of their life, to sit with them and stay with them. They are provided with training and many of them work as volunteers, giving of their own experience, their ability to be calm and the wisdom that comes with age to those who are frightened and to support families. That is just one example.
At a personal level, I also experienced over the summer how well some of the services can work to enable and re-enable the elderly. My 95 year-old uncle, adamant that he was not going into hospital, looked as if he was dying. The sensitivity and compassion with which Westminster social services dealt with him when he was in need has re-enabled him. He is now back using his iPad, working, in a voluntary capacity of course, and lending a listening ear to other people who are lonely and want someone to talk to. He has a great network that he is supporting, and he is contributing back into that society. Sometimes it can be done, but the elderly population themselves need to be encouraged and harnessed, and our policies need to recognise that.
In healthcare we view the elderly potentially as a problem. I had the privilege of being asked by Mark Drakeford, the Minister for Health and Social Services, following my time on this committee, to lead a national conversation in Wales about the unscheduled care of the elderly. There the problems are exactly the same, with emergency departments that seem to be full of elderly people. Indeed, there has been a 26% rise in the past four years of elderly people attending emergency departments but they do that by default. They go to hospital because it is the only part of the system that is open 24/7. Like other noble Lords, I fully support the need for a seven-day service. We cannot have a service that admits on seven days and discharges people on four and a half days. That does not add up.
We need to change attitudes, too, across the whole piece to stop being risk-averse, so that the kind of delays we heard about of people getting home will go, and that people will be respected for their own ideas and for what they want to do. Care homes are a place that many people fear going into. In our inquiry, we found that things are not always as good as they should be. It is a tragedy that one in 20 people report that they do not always get adequate or timely food and drink. Even though 71% are very or extremely satisfied with their care, that drops to only 55% for home care. So the attitude within all aspects of the services has to change to say that the older person is of worth. Cicely Saunders said that dignity was having a sense of personal worth. We need to value that wisdom and that cohort and harness them.
I hope that the Government and all future Governments will proofread every policy that they produce against the needs of the elderly to make sure that they are maximising the ability of the elderly—the older population—to live well and to contribute their resources back into the society in which they have lived and to which they have contributed previously.
Care Bill [HL]
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
Before the noble Lord sits down, can he just clarify something? Noble Lords will have to forgive me, because we have had some very learned legal arguments here and I speak as a simple clinician. Half of the patients in a place of care run by a private provider may be funded by, and have gone through assessments provided by, the NHS. They would therefore be covered by the Human Rights Act but the other half, who have to fund their own care because some official somewhere said that they did not fall within the bar for continuing care funding, would not be covered. The decision as to whether the cover, at the end of the day, applies or does not apply will be left to whichever person determines the funding bar for that individual, as opposed to our knowing that we have protection for those who are vulnerable across the piece.
Lord Faulks
The noble Baroness refers to protection. With respect, the assumption behind her question is that, whatever the arrangements, those people would lack any protection. The burden of my speech is that they would have protection anyway. There is, of course, a distinction between whether their care is a result of a publicly procured arrangement or a purely private arrangement. In the latter case, as the law is currently, there would not be any involvement of the Human Rights Act. But, with respect, the House should not be under any illusion that there is no remedy or no protection for people in the circumstances where there is a private arrangement.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, I shall speak also to the other amendments in my name in this group. I thank the Minister for the government amendments, which go a considerable way towards helping the arrangements for the transition of children to adulthood. My amendments are intended to strengthen that. I thank my noble friend Lady Finlay for putting her name to the amendments.
Amendment 83A is one of a series of amendments which I have tabled with the intention of bringing about better outcomes for young people who need to transition from child to adult palliative care services. These young people are represented by the Transition Taskforce, a partnership of organisations which includes Help the Hospices, the National Council for Palliative Care, Marie Curie Cancer Care and Together for Short Lives. All these organisations support these amendments.
I have spoken previously at other stages of the Bill about the 40,000 children and young people—these are the numbers we are talking about—aged from 0 to 19 in England who live with long-term health conditions, which for most of these children will eventually end their lives and for which they may require palliative care. Medical advances mean, however, that young people with a range of different conditions now live to adulthood—some 10% of the 40,000 children now live beyond 19 years.
Good planned transition, when it works, changes the lives of these young people. Unfortunately, for the majority that is not happening. I will give the example of one young girl, Lucy Watts, who is 20 years old, and has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which means that Lucy has a number of inherited conditions which were diagnosed by the time she was a teenager and is unable to eat normal food. Her system does not digest food and she is fed intravenously all the time. While she is able to sit up for a few hours a day, Lucy spends most of her time in bed. Lucy’s mum, who has a full-time job, carries out the majority of her care and all of her day-to-day medical care.
However, Lucy is fortunate, because her transition to adult service was excellent because there was joint working between children’s and adult services over the course of a whole year. That is the important point. It takes a long time for transition arrangements to be put in place for these children. Lucy is quite a feisty young lady. She said:
“Transitioning from children’s to adult in the medical and social world is a huge step ... The people involved in my care have been very supportive and were brought in before I started the transition”.
Lucy’s case demonstrates how important it is for young people and families that their transition is planned well in advance of their 18th birthday and why our amendments to stipulate a timeframe for a child’s needs assessment are so important.
I very much welcome the fact that the Government have amended the Bill to ensure that when it appears to a local authority that the child or their carer is likely to have needs for care and support after the child becomes 18, the local authority must assess them. I appreciate, too, the Government’s stated position that the needs of very young people are different and that their care needs can change between the ages of 14 and 18 in a variety of ways. However, our amendments would provide flexibility by ensuring that assessments could be initiated before the age of 14 if requested by the child or parent or if it appears to the local authority that an assessment is necessary and appropriate. Local authorities would have until the age of 16 to assess the child’s needs. They would not be prevented from reassessing a young person if their needs changed before they reached 18. They would also enable local authorities a period of two years to assess the child’s needs in cases where their care needs become apparent only after the age of 14. Without these important thresholds, it is feasible that a local authority may leave it too late to carry out a child’s needs assessment.
Setting the age threshold for a child’s needs assessment at 14 is also based on the existing statutory requirement for every young person in year 9—that is, aged 14 to 15—with a statement of special educational needs to have a transition plan. Our amendment would ensure that transition planning correlates with that requirement and reflects best practice in exemplary palliative care services in England. It is entirely reasonable that some young people with life-limiting conditions, including those with conditions such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy, could be expected from an early stage to live beyond 18. Assessing and planning for their future needs should therefore begin at the age of 14. Our amendments would ensure that this is the case without disadvantaging young people with other disabilities, which is the concern that was expressed. The Bill already stipulates that where a local authority deems a child’s assessment not to be in the best interest of the young person or the young person does not consent to being assessed, an assessment will not take place.
Amendment 89B, which is a long amendment, corrects the anomaly of the transition and the duty on local authorities. While the Bill currently makes provisions to enable local authorities to carry out a child’s needs assessment, there is no duty on local authorities to use the assessment to create a transition plan for the young person. Amendment 89B would ensure that, if a child’s needs assessment finds that a young person is likely to need health or social care when they reach adulthood, a statutory five-year rolling transition plan should be prepared by the time they are 16.
The amendment has a number of other important features. It would ensure that children, parents and carers were involved in the transition planning process and that transition plans are maintained until the young person reaches the age of 25, which 10% of these children would probably reach. Further, one of the provisions included in the Children and Families Bill is to introduce an integrated education, health and care plan—or EHC plan—for young people who have special educational needs. This will include many—but, crucially, not all—young people who need palliative care. Where a young person stays in education or training, they will be eligible for an EHC plan until the age of 25. I recognise that an EHC plan could fulfil the functions which I intend the transition plan in my amendment to fulfil. An optimal position would be for EHC plans to be available to all young disabled people up to the age of 25—but that is not the case. Our amendments will provide similarly joined-up transition provision for young people who need palliative care but do not have SEN.
Amendments 93A, 94A and 94B would amend and address the carer’s needs. In considering young people who need to transition from children’s to adult services, it is also important that we address the needs of those who care for them. I welcome the Government’s aspiration to do so and the amendment that the Government have already tabled to strengthen the Bill. However, as with the clauses relating to planning for young people’s needs on transition, we need to go further in order to ensure that planning for carers also happens in a timely fashion. Amendment 93A would introduce an age threshold of 14 at which a local authority would be duty-bound to undertake a child carer’s needs assessment.
I hope that I have persuaded the Minister that his amendments, excellent as they are, need a bit more tweaking to make it possible to streamline the process of transition of children to adulthood. My amendments merely help to do that. Some children may of course begin to need long-term health or social care after they are 14. In such cases it may not be reasonable to expect a local authority to complete a child carer’s needs assessment before the child reaches the age of 16. I hope that the Minister will be persuaded enough to add to his excellent amendments a few more to fulfil these needs. I look forward to hearing his response.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend Lord Patel for the way in which he has introduced our amendments. I greatly welcome the Government’s amendments in this area of transition. The reason that our amendments are written as they are is because this group of children are different to adults who are terminally ill. They have life-limiting conditions, but their prognosis may be years. However, during that time they know that they will deteriorate, as do their parents. We are therefore looking at completely different timeframes, and with completely unpredictable prognoses, except for the likelihood that they will live through into adulthood. Some of them, of course, live surprisingly long periods of time and may live several decades into adulthood. They tend to have the inherited disorders of metabolism. They are a different cohort from those who have terminal illnesses such as cancer. There are also those children who, for example, have had very severe sudden injuries, such as a severe head injury, and then develop epilepsy, which can then become so severe that it is life threatening. Many of the children also have learning difficulties and educational needs.
Tobacco Products Directive
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, our position is clear: e-cigarettes should be regulated as medicines. These products need to be regulated for safety and quality, one of the reasons being that, as medicines, we can more effectively control their sale to children and the way that they are advertised and promoted. We need to take an approach that is future proof, being applicable to new technology nicotine products in whatever form might be brought forward in the future.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
Can the Minister tell us what action the Government intend to take over slim cigarettes, which were not affected in the recent EU directive but which are particularly appealing to young girls and are often a route to introducing them to becoming addicted to tobacco?
Earl Howe
The noble Baroness makes a very good point. While some in the public health community are concerned about slim cigarettes, and understandably so, both the European Parliament and the Council decided that slims should not be banned under this directive. However, she is right that slims are known to be more attractive to women than men. It may be something that remains on the agenda for future consideration at a European level.
Care Bill [HL]
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I declare all my interests in this field, which are listed. These amendments are incredibly important for patients who are dying. The Government’s amendment is to be welcomed; I can see no problems with it. It might sound bizarre but I have some slight anxieties over the wording in two places in Amendment 137. It refers to a preferred place of death, whereas I would rather see the words, “preferred place of care”. Many people who are dying know that they want to spend their last days, weeks or months at home. They want to have everything done to support them at home, particularly out of hours. We have debated this for some time within my own specialist teams and specialist services. We are worried that there could be two unintended consequences. People who are not yet ready to confront the fact that they really are dying will be pushed to have that conversation before they are ready, which would be traumatic. There could also be the unintended consequence of some kind of target developing and patients being whipped out of one place of care.
The difficulty we see clinically is that when clinical situations change, patients sometimes change their mind. It is not uncommon for someone who originally said they wanted to die at home to say, when they really are dying, that they feel safer where they are and want their family brought in and as much of a home environment created as possible. It may be the regulations at ward level, or the way in which they are interpreted, which are blocking that and need to be addressed. For example, it does not matter at all if you have a husband on an all-female ward, but I have occasionally known staff to think that it does and that it is not appropriate to have a man stay overnight, which is absolutely appalling. Staff need to recreate the home environment where that person is as much as possible. However, if they have complex needs or unstable symptoms, they may well feel safer in whichever place they are, whether it is hospice or hospital.
In looking at the amendment I also tried to get some details of how many patients are successful under the DS1500 special rules. It is quite difficult, because I understand that the Department for Work and Pensions does not routinely collect that data. However, it seems as if in the year 2011-12, 11% of all successful claims were for the category of patients who were deemed to be terminally ill. One of the difficulties when you are looking at local authority charges for adult social care is that we cannot predict prognosis. That is always the catch with defining terminal illness. We are making our best guess, as it says in the Welfare Reform Act, as to whether someone can “reasonably be expected” to die within six months, but it is no better than that. It is a guess. There are patients who outlive their prognosis. I understand that the DWP does not push for reassessment inside three years, so there is quite a lengthy period of leeway. The potential difficulty that I can see unless this is really thought through and costed is that if somebody turns out not to be dying, what will then happen? Would they be forced to go through a reassessment? Would that then be used to try to claim back money from them afterwards? I raise those questions which would have to be thought through very carefully.
I certainly find it difficult—in fact, offensive—when people have to be assessed for care when they are quite clearly dying. However, there is that group of people you really do not know about. They appear as if they are dying. They tend to be more in the non-cancer rather than the cancer population, where their prognosis prediction becomes really difficult.
Those are just some caveats, although I support the spirit of the amendment wholeheartedly in terms of having patients where they want to be. However, as I said before, we need to focus on their place of care during their last days, weeks and months, and not only on their place of death.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
My Lords, I very much welcome government Amendment 57. Of course, I have supported the recommendation of the Joint Committee on this matter, and continue to do so. Subsection (a) of Amendment 137 is important as a way forward. However, the difficulties to which the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has referred, are quite important in this connection. Many people in terminal situations would find a hospice one of the best places to go if that choice were open to them. Many people, of course, would prefer to die at home in a family situation. The hospices are normally able to engender a family atmosphere around death. People I have spoken to in the hospices have said, “If you have to die, this is the place to do so”; the “if” is not all that important.
There are practical questions to be taken into account, but it would be quite a step forward if the Government were able to come forward at Third Reading with an amendment which allowed some form of indication of the place of care, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, says, or the place where one would wish to terminate one’s life in a way that was registered, so that those responsible would be able to give effect to it, so far as is possible, having regard to the changes that can take place in the last few months, days and hours.
Care Bill [HL]
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, on reading carefully the amendments in the name of the Minister, I hope that he will be able to provide reassurance that his amendments will go further than Amendments 22 and 25 to which I have added my name and that they will be much more about the whole person and the whole person’s needs. I recognise that there are dangers in putting a timeframe around anything; there is the danger that it will be used as a so-called minimum standard, down to which people will drop. I initially wanted to support these amendments and I suppose, if I had a choice, I would have added my name to those of the Minister now, because there is a real problem if care is not adequate in quality and promoting well-being in that it creates dependency rather than reablement towards increasing independence. There is a sense of personal worth that goes along with being able to do things, however slowly, rather than having to accept somebody doing them for you because they are in a terrible rush. I hope that the Minister will provide us with a much wider reassurance than the words suggest at first glance.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)
My Lords, I was most interested to hear the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and I agreed with every word, but I do think the time limit specified would not be right and I strongly support Amendment 27. However, there are other aspects of this care issue that we have not really thought about.
One that is covered in Amendment 27 is about the well-being of carers. I find it very disturbing that a woman I know who lives in with a person needing pretty comprehensive care every Saturday and Sunday and stays overnight on both nights, is appallingly paid for this because she is self-employed. I said to her that I could not believe she was earning so little when it is such a very important job and so very time consuming. I told her I would look on the internet to see what she is entitled to as a minimum wage. It turns out that there is no minimum wage for a self-employed person. That quite stunned me; there is a great reservoir of people who would be willing to take on self-employed caring positions and do them for quite long periods, not rushing people, but not at her rate of pay, which worked out at a little over £2 an hour for all the hours she was there. I suggested that, since she had done training in care, she should work instead for the people who provide a service for the local authority. She followed that up and it turned out that she would not earn much more, because they are not paid for travelling time. Unless the organisation improved so that her two, three, four or 10 jobs—whatever it is—were almost next door to one another, the unpaid travelling time would constitute much more of her day than the time actually caring for people.
The other point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, is that it is more than just physical care. We have heard much in recent days about people’s extreme loneliness, how they can go almost for days with hardly a word with anyone. That is a most essential thing in life, to feel that you have not been abandoned. The woman in the television report talked about taking your coat off, making your booking and going through it all, and how you are left with 10 minutes in the middle and then you book in a final 10 minutes to reverse everything. That is exactly what I remember from when I was chairman of local social services 30 years ago; that was exactly the same problem then.
These are not new problems; because there are so many more older people who need more care, and there is more awareness, with people wanting to stay in their own homes, this problem has grown, and we do not have the solutions to match the need. I strongly support the emphasis on the well-being of carers, which is mentioned in Amendment 27—that is important. People should feel that they are doing a worthwhile job and that what they are doing is helping other people. They should also be reasonably remunerated for it. There is so much that we would all support; I feel that all noble Lords in this Chamber want to see more help and more efficiently used help. Amendment 27 in particular covers a lot, but whatever offers can be made, so much the better.
Lord Warner
I support the important amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. I want to do so by telling a story and then putting a suggestion to the Minister. Like my noble friend Lord Hunt and me, he will have done his time touring hospitals as a Minister. We are usually shown the high points of the hospital’s achievements. Life changes a bit when you cease to be a Minister and you visit your friends and relatives in hospital. On visits to hospitals to see friends and relatives, because I am a nosy sort of person I have always looked to see whether there is a date for discharge on the charts. Some of these discharge dates are great works of fiction. When I have asked nurses about these discharge dates, quite commonly they say that managers have told them they have to have a discharge date—so it is something they have done for internal compliance purposes.
Although the suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, may not be right for the Bill, it is at the very least important for guidance. Planning on admission for discharge is needed. Present arrangements fail to communicate that to the social care world. It is now an internal mechanism for the NHS, not a mechanism designed to get people out of hospital into an appropriate placement as soon as they are ready to go. It would be a good idea to put this in the Bill, but at the very least this issue needs to be covered in some detail in guidance so that the NHS and the social care world are clear beyond peradventure what they are supposed to do when a person comes into hospital. If we went along that path, the world would be a better place and we would deliver some of the objectives of this legislation.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, I shall be brief since the hour is getting late. This amendment makes a very important point, though it may be better in guidance. One of the problems is that the pinch point is always A&E, and getting patients out is really difficult. At the moment, there is tokenism in planning discharge. It needs to be much more embedded in trying to predict people’s needs and having things in place. Until discharge planning really is part of looking ahead at the aims for the patient we are still going to have backlogs, because we are still going to be waiting for somebody to come in and do something.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for tabling Amendments 29 and 125, on what is undoubtedly an extremely important issue, not just for the system but, most importantly, for the patients themselves. When someone is discharged from an acute care setting, care and support must be joined up to prevent unnecessary delays and readmissions that can be distressing to patients and their families and carers. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was absolutely right on increasing pressure on acute trusts, not least in A&E.
There is a mixture of reasons why this is occurring: the weight of patient demand; the acuity of patients who present at A&E, more of whom have to be admitted; workforce issues in some A&E departments; hospital discharge practices that may not be as efficient as they should be; an absence of follow-on care in certain locations or, indeed, adult social care services; and delays in installing home adaptations. One cannot generalise about this problem. One can say only that in many areas it is very real.
I will just correct the noble Lord on one issue: the £250 million that we have allocated to ease the pressures on A&E. Those moneys went to 53 NHS trusts before the end of September. They went to trusts that were most at risk of breaching the A&E standards. They were not chosen by Ministers or the Government. The process was led by NHS England and Monitor, so it was done on a structured and objective basis.
Cigarette Packaging
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(10 years, 12 months ago)
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Earl Howe
I am sure that we could get into an interesting conceptual discussion about the difference between strategy and policy. The key point is that Mr Crosby has been very clear in his public statement. He has said:
“At no time have I had any conversation or discussion with or lobbied the prime minister, or indeed the health secretary or the health minister, on plain packaging or tobacco issues”.
That is very clear.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
What assessment do the Government intend to make in the coming year of the appeal of current packaging, given that some of the slimline packaging is particularly attractive and enticing to young women and that some of the chunky packaging is particularly enticing to the macho side of young men?
Earl Howe
The noble Baroness gives me the opportunity to make clear that plain packaging of tobacco is very much still in our sights; we have not decided to reject that option. I am sure that the psychology of marketing is one very important area that we will continue to focus on.
NHS: Accident and Emergency Services
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(10 years, 12 months ago)
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Earl Howe
We have been taking action in several areas. We released additional money to ensure that immediate pressures were relieved in the health service in the spring and, as I have said, that was successful. We are encouraging, and have ensured, the setting up of urgent care wards, which amount to the kind of discussions across the system in local areas that are needed to ensure that there are no blockages in that system. More fundamentally, we have tasked Sir Bruce Keogh to undertake the work that I referred to earlier, looking at the root causes of why there have been these pressures on A&E. There is no single answer to that question.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, I declare my interests, including that my daughter is an A&E consultant in London. Are the Government planning specifically to put in some additional resources to support A&E departments now, given that the consultants need more infrastructure support, including people at a much lower grade—clerical staff, care assistants and alcohol support workers—to cope with the peaks that occur of those who have come in having abused alcohol, who take staff away from the other very sick patients, who are often in resus and whom they are also trying to look after at the same time?
Earl Howe
The answer to the noble Baroness’s question is yes. We are looking very carefully at workforce issues and the mix of skills needed in those A&E departments that have been struggling. I refer not simply to A&E consultants but also specialists in their field—perhaps alcohol is a good example—who can deflect the pressure away from staff looking after acutely ill patients.
Smoking: Cigarette Packaging
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the basis for the decision not to proceed with standardised packaging of cigarettes.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
Standardised packaging remains a policy under active consideration. The Government have not ruled out its introduction. However, we want to spend more time assimilating information about the likely effect of such a policy in this country and learning from experience abroad. Let me be clear: we are not going soft on tobacco, which is a leading cause of premature death. We have an ambitious tobacco control plan and will press ahead with tobacco control policies, including removing tobacco from displays in shops.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
I declare my interest as president-elect of the BMA. As 200,000 11 to 15 year- olds start smoking each year in the UK, what are the criteria and time frames that the Government will use to judge the outcomes of standardised packaging in Australia? The high mortality rate does not appear until about 25 years after these youngsters start smoking. As this is fundamentally a child protection issue, how will the Government now prevent vulnerable children—particularly those in local authority care—from starting smoking, given that the Department of Health’s own systematic review showed that current packs are particularly attractive to youngsters and that they mislead them into thinking that some brands are less harmful than others?
Earl Howe
My Lords, we want to keep a close eye on what is happening around the world before making a decision. We are keeping standardised packaging under active consideration. It has been newly introduced in Australia, and other countries are intending to follow suit, so it is sensible for us to see what we can learn from other countries’ experience. The impacts could be several. They could include, for example, health benefits, as well as impacts on businesses such as retailers and tobacco manufacturers, and could possibly bring about a change in attitude to smoking.
On the risk to children, the noble Baroness is of course absolutely right. Evidence suggests that action needs to be taken to reshape social norms around smoking so that tobacco becomes less desirable, less acceptable and less accessible, particularly to the young. That is why we are committed to ending tobacco displays in shops. We have a TV-led marketing campaign to encourage smokers not to smoke at home or in cars and we have banned the sale of tobacco in vending machines, which has removed a source of cigarettes that underage smokers could access as often as they liked. There is a range of work going on.
Health: Prescription Drugs
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Earl Howe
My noble friend will be encouraged to know that Public Health England has published a commissioning guide for the NHS and local authorities which sets out its expectation that support should be available in every area for people with a dependency on prescription or over-the-counter medicines. Local authorities are now, as she is aware, responsible for commissioning services to support people to recover from dependence in line with local need. Most of the support available for people who are addicted to prescription drugs is with their GP and not in services treating those addicted to illegal drugs, but there is a range of services available.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
To better understand the size of the problem, will the Government consider adding a box to the yellow card, which has been successful in reporting adverse drug reactions, to state that the doctor suspects that this person may have dependence on the drug? That would provide ongoing epidemiological monitoring.