Care Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Wheeler and Lord Rea

Monday 10th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rea]

My Lords, I must apologise for not moving this amendment in its proper place on the first day in Committee. That was due to a misunderstanding on my part, and I apologise.

I put down this probing amendment to draw attention to the importance and relevance of interprofessional education in preparing different health and social care staff to work well together. It is recognised across the board that caring for the increasing proportion of the population with long-term problems requires teamwork. This will be more effective and economically efficient if the different members of the team understand the role and approach of other members of the team with whom they need to collaborate, be they social workers, nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists or doctors. At present, each healthcare worker may have no proper conception of the abilities and skills of those in another discipline, and that may lead to inefficient working, inappropriate decisions and learning by trial and error, if at all. One thinks perhaps of Stafford.

The duty to promote integration is much used in legislation but is mainly directed to administrators at a high level. For example, in last year’s Health and Social Care Act the NHS Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups were directed to take note of the need for integration, and in this Bill promoting integration is a requirement on local authorities. In Clause 88, in which this amendment sits,

“HEE must have regard to … the desirability of promoting the integration of health provision with health-related provision”.

The detail of how integration is to be achieved is left to the bodies concerned, although there may well be, and certainly should be, guidance, which I have not seen but which is perhaps to be published later. Perhaps the Minister can fill me in here. My amendment could perhaps be considered when formulating such guidance.

Interprofessional education needs to be carried out at educational or training institutions for clinical and social care professionals but also in continuing postgraduate education. Therefore, it is not only to Health Education England but to the General Medical Council, other professional bodies, royal colleges, universities, postgraduate deans and LETBs that this amendment is directed.

I do not have much time to describe the details of how IPE works, and this is not the right place to do so. Suffice it to say that it is not something I have invented off the top of my head but is a recognised discipline, led in this country by CAIPE, the Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education. It has branches in several countries on both sides of the Atlantic and has produced a number of publications describing the method and the institutions that have adopted it. It has also commissioned several evaluative studies which have confirmed its effectiveness. CAIPE is in touch with the Department of Health, and positive discussions have taken place. The Minister will probably know about them. In fact, I understand that CAIPE is due to meet Health Education England to discuss possible future collaboration. Interprofessional education is up and running in at least five universities, including Leicester, De Montfort, Bristol, Sheffield Hallam and Aberdeen.

I am aware that there are plenty of problems involved in getting different professions to receive co-ordinated education, not least logistics and timetabling. Students may not at first appreciate the need for understanding and co-operation, so do not always take kindly to what they may see as a diversion from their task of learning the skills needed for their chosen profession. However, once they meet each other, understanding can grow. Directors of education need to be convinced of the benefits of IPE. Its benefits are summarised well in a recent WHO task force report:

“After almost 50 years of inquiry, there is now sufficient evidence to indicate that interprofessional education enables effective collaborative practice which in turn optimizes health-services, strengthens health systems and improves health outcomes ... In both acute and primary care settings, patients report higher levels of satisfaction, better acceptance of care and improved health outcomes following treatment by a collaborative team”.

I shall be most interested to hear the Minister’s views on IPE and whether he agrees that it deserves to be more widely used in the National Health Service. I beg to move.

[Baroness Wheeler]

My Lords, I shall make a brief intervention in support of the desire of my noble friend Lord Rea to draw our attention to the importance of interprofessional education if we are to develop health and social care staff’s mutual respect, understanding and knowledge of each other’s professions that will bring about the collaboration, joint working and integration of care and support that we need. My noble friend describes this as staff knowing “how the other half lives”—in other words, staff knowing about each other’s services and how they operate, and being aware of boundaries, interdependence on achieving outcomes and competing agendas. He commends IPE because it provides an established model of collaboration and co-operation on the ground.

The amendment refers back to our earlier debate on integration and the need for multidisciplinary teamworking, and it will also be relevant to the debate that we will come to shortly on the importance of continuing professional development for healthcare workers. It adds promoting the use of joint IPE for clinical and social care staff as a matter that HEE must have regard to in relation to its responsibility for promoting the integration of healthcare and health-related provision.

My noble friend helpfully sent me a considerable amount of background information on his amendment in which, as a former HR professional, I was genuinely interested. It included extensive research by the Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education, which my noble friend referred to, supporting the effectiveness of interprofessional education and training. My noble friend also referred to discussions between CAIPE and Health Education England to explore HEE’s role in taking IPE forward and embedding it in professional curricula. This is to be welcomed. Two-thirds of UK universities with two or more undergraduate programmes in health and social care include IPE, so these discussions will be helpful. These programmes cover a wide range of professions, including nursing, social work, physiotherapy, pharmacy, clinical psychology and radiography—all professions that are increasingly required to work flexibly across different care settings as part of multidisciplinary teams.

The Nuffield Trust evaluation of the first year of the inner north-west London integrated pilot that I referred to earlier underlined the importance of staff in multiprofessional teams having a high level of commitment to the pilot as a key factor in improving collaboration across different parts of the local health and care system. However, the evaluation also reminds us of the international evidence that integrated care takes years to develop and that a minimum of three to five years is needed to show impact in relation to patient experience and outcomes. Culture change, moving from silo to collaborative working among professionals, is a slow process, however committed we are to trying to make it work. I look forward to the Minister’s response to my noble friend’s amendment.