Health: Visitor Service

Baroness Jolly Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

The right reverend Prelate draws attention to a very important area. Family Nurse Partnership is essentially a preventive programme for vulnerable young first-time mothers. It complements and supports the work of health visitors, providing intensive care. We are committed to expanding the Family Nurse Partnership Programme for those families and doubling the number of places on the programme by 2015.

[Baroness Jolly]

My Lords, this is a really large programme. Will the noble Earl clarify whether, if these posts are filled from within the NHS, those posts will in turn be backfilled?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, we hope to recruit nurses and midwives for upskilling from a variety of sources. Some will come out of retirement, we hope, while others will, we trust, come from the acute sector. As my noble friend knows, the trend for a long time has been to try to get care increasingly out of acute settings and into the community. I think that we will see that transfer of skills taking place from a variety of sources.

Health: Alcohol Minimum Pricing

Baroness Jolly Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords—

[Baroness Jolly]

My Lords—

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords, now that the Minister and the Government have accepted that raising the price of alcohol is one of the ways in which we can minimise harm to those who are abusing alcohol, why have the Government’s recent proposals been so minimal? The cost of a can of lager will be increased, or minimised, to 38p under the new arrangements. This is hardly going to make any change whatsoever. We have to wait for the White Paper in the summer, but in the mean time why could a more positive approach to raising the cost of alcohol not have been taken and more fundamental changes made to the ever increasing easy access to alcohol, which is another problem that needs addressing?

Health: Multiple Sclerosis

Baroness Jolly Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, at the moment, the appeal process is to the primary care trust. Under the Government's proposals, the appeal will be, in the first instance, to the GP-led consortium and, thereafter, if appropriate, to the NHS commissioning board.

[Baroness Jolly]

My Lords, medication is clearly critical for patients with MS, but a whole range of aids are also available. How does my noble friend think that those aids might be more readily available under the new, reformed NHS?

[Earl Howe]

Again, my Lords, the requirement for aids will emerge from two driving processes: one will be the clinically led commissioning process and the other will be patient-led groups. Neurological Commissioning Support is already driving forward an extremely coherent and up-to-the-minute commissioning pattern of pathways for the emerging GP consortia. Patient power will have a big influence as well.

NHS: Front-line and Specialised Services

Baroness Jolly Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jolly]

My Lords, I start by thanking noble Lords kindly for the warm welcome that I have found since my introduction on Tuesday—from Members opposite as well as from my own Benches. Advice about my speech was to keep it simple, but most of all to keep it short. I extend these thanks to members of staff who have been exceptionally helpful in all manner of ways. I must say that I am not without trepidation. My introduction by comparison was easy, as once in my robes I was but an actor. Today, I feel somewhat naked without them, particularly in such eminent company.

I live in Cornwall in a community of some six or seven houses overlooking Bodmin Moor. We have little choice in our services. We use them where we can find them and so rely on them all to be excellent, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, said. Disappointment is rare. My sponsors, my noble friends Lord Tyler and Lord Teverson, have both left their mark on Cornwall, and I am delighted that today another friend of Cornwall was introduced—my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames. The bottom left-hand corner may be far away, but in this place it will not be forgotten.

I trained as a control engineer, taught maths for 15 years, and spent time living and working in the Gulf. On coming home, I joined an NHS trust board. Some years later, a couple of NHS reorganisations found me chairing a Cornish PCT and managing a budget of £120 million. Recently, I have been working for Macmillan Cancer Support, a charity dedicated to providing excellent services to those whose lives are affected by cancer, as well as for a campaigning organisation on issues as varied as fuel poverty and survivorship. It was difficult delivering services in such a rural environment, especially ensuring that services are linked as seamlessly as possible with our social services. Not a year went by when we did not have to find savings to be passed on to services.

In the past, my family has had brief engagements with the NHS, but it was not until last November when my father had a heart attack that I saw the NHS in action for real, for one of mine. One evening, he went to bed feeling unwell. We called NHS Direct. It called an ambulance, which was with us in 15 minutes. After a half-hour dash he was admitted directly to the South West Cardiothoracic Centre in Plymouth. His ECG had been e-mailed ahead by the ambulance crew and he was met by a team called in on a Saturday night. Led by Dr Haywood, his team was professional, caring and candid. The ward really resembled the bridge from the starship “Enterprise”, but it was here too that I heard talk of patient dignity and advocacy. My father mattered, as did my mother—a lady who will be 90 on her next birthday.

Cornwall still has a network of community hospitals that allows patients to be treated nearer their homes, relieves beds in the pressured acute units and prepares patients to return home. In time, at my local community hospital in Launceston, I saw at first hand social services working with the ward team, the physio and occupational therapists. The patient came first and together they got my Dad home. Sadly, the NHS was no match finally for age and frailty. He died one month ago today. We saw the NHS at its finest, from the highest of high-tech medicine to the best of nursing care, working seamlessly across four NHS organisations and social services.

In the PCT our decisions involved executive directors, non-executive directors and, most importantly, health professionals. We were committed to a comprehensive service that is available to all, free at the point of use and based on need and not on the ability to pay. We took into consideration local issues—rurality, sparcity, atypical demographics and huge population increases in the summer. We did not run or commission services in the same way in Cornwall as they are here in the capital.

In conclusion, the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, are well made. I would add that in reframing the NHS, I trust that the noble Earl will give every care and consideration to service delivery and, more importantly, to appropriate and adequate funding for far-flung remote rural areas, such as Cornwall.