Health

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord for securing this debate. I was reflecting on whether he is happy or sad that he no longer runs the great NHS, for it seems to me that in many ways there has been no greater time of excitement, with innovations and improvements. At the same time—my goodness me—we need them more than ever. Perhaps the greatest of those innovations and improvements is the internet. I would call it the organising principle of our age, yet there is by no means the same organisation around it in our health service.

You can perhaps keep on your phone in your pocket as much health information as your GP has about you—perhaps even more. When I describe the House of Lords to people outside it, I often put some of the longevity in this Chamber down to the fact that noble Lords walk around so much along the endless corridors. I would love to be able to give all noble Lords a Jawbone UP or other device to wear around their wrists to test my philosophy. I have—although I do not have it with me today—a bracelet that nudges me every now and then to help my nerves by moving and wriggling. There are endless devices, of which I am sure some noble Lords are aware, that help people to read practically every single vital life sign. This is an exciting time: it can only be a good thing to have more information, not less.

I have worked with two small UK companies. One, called Sleepio, is helping to address the enormous challenge of insomnia. It has an app—a device that it uses to help people talk about their health after having had a bad night’s sleep, and to give tips about how to get a better one. There has been a more than 50% improvement in people’s sleep, and a 100% improvement in respect of the number of sleep drugs people are taking. Another small company, HealthUnlocked, helps people to find patient groups with diseases like their own. One of its most important and useful groups is concerned with diabetes. The people using it say that they have experienced an improvement in quality of life with the disease of some 60%, and a 30% reduction in the number of drugs they use. These are profound and important shifts, all enabled by the internet.

However, I must wave two enormous red banners about the huge risks that I see coming over the horizon. The first is one that I mention not out of any parochialism or jingoism: we would be mistaken to think that it is not a very small area of a very small bit of the west coast of America that is likely to dominate the health creation of the future. Google, Facebook and the other big US platforms have designs on our health. Google, even in its failed attempt to build health records, took 30 million individuals’ health records in a very short space of time. This is an enormous issue that we need to debate and think about much more carefully. The force for good is hugely powerful, but the possibility that our enormously valuable NHS will lose ground to these incredibly well-invested organisations, which understand technology at their very core, is real. If we are to have a truly health-creating society, deploying all the tools in our armoury, we must think very carefully about enabling the NHS to “compete”—in the right way—with some of these giants. For me, the potential access to the data that our great NHS has, and the inclusivity and universality of those data, is one of our greatest weapons, but it would be a mistake to imagine that we are anywhere near that right now.

My second red flag concerns digital skills and inclusion. I declare an interest as chair of Go ON UK, a charity that I set up to build digital skills in the UK. There are 12 million adults in this country who cannot do basic things online, yet we know that the internet is one of the most powerful tools in combating the loneliness that I am delighted to say many people in this Chamber have already mentioned.

I end with a story from a woman I met in Birmingham, who told me that the internet has quite literally saved her life. Even I, prone to hyperbole, was sceptical, but she described how she was one of the 1.5 million people over 65 who see no one in a week. She had learnt how to use social media and had connected to family that she had not seen in many years. She told me that it had stopped her wanting to jump off the building where she lived. If that is not health creation, I do not know what is.