Care Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Wheeler and Lord Rix

Wednesday 7th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rix (CB)]

My Lords, on behalf of learning disabled people and other vulnerable people I should like to thank the Government for making this amendment, which certainly ensures that their care will be greatly attended to in the future.

[Baroness Wheeler]

My Lords, briefly, I also support the Government’s amendment on this long-running but vital issue. As the House knows, we strongly supported the need for the amendment. We, too, warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Low, on his dogged determination and efforts to achieve this outcome. We also thank noble Lords from across the House who have helped to bring this about. On these Benches, we recognise that this was very much unfinished business from the Labour Government. We congratulate the Minister on the hard work he has put into finding a way forward and to getting cross-government departmental agreement, which has been important. We recognise that the amendment is a very significant step. I was going to ask for clarification on a couple of issues, but they have been raised in the debate so I shall leave it there.

Care Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Wheeler and Lord Rix

Tuesday 4th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheeler]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 10. These two amendments seek to make sure that Clause 84 and Schedule 5 specify the responsibility of Health Education England to ensure, throughout its work, the promotion of a comprehensive health service which gives equal consideration to the importance of physical and mental health and the health of people with learning difficulties. This parity of esteem, putting mental health on a par with physical health, must be a key principle carried through HEE’s work and in the education and training of healthcare workers, and it is important that the Bill specifies this. Why is that? It is because the lack of parity continues to have a massive impact. The most recent psychiatric morbidity surveys show that, despite theoretical parity under existing legislation, only a minority of those with a mental disorder in England receive any intervention, in stark contrast to other disease areas, such as cancer, almost all of which have some intervention.

Labour is proud that it introduced the NHS constitution and is pleased that it now has widespread support. However, we acknowledge that it did not go far enough in ensuring that parity of esteem was entrenched into the constitution. This is especially important as the growing number of NHS bodies and organisations established under the Government’s NHS reforms are all required to take the constitution into account in all they do.

Noble Lords will recall that parity of esteem was a hard-fought-for, last-minute inclusion in the Health and Social Care Act. It is vital because it is important to do everything that we can to ensure that this key NHS objective is taken seriously and is underlined at every stage. We welcome the steps in the HEE mandate recognising HEE’s leadership role in this, including a focus on the mental health workforce to ensure that there are sufficient psychiatrists and other clinicians and specialist staff working to build the values and skills to facilitate continuous service improvement, developing training programmes which ensure that all staff have awareness of mental health problems and how they may affect their patients, and ensuring that the mental health needs of people with long-term health conditions are addressed concurrently and not as an afterthought.

We particularly welcome HEE’s leadership role in providing, through LETBs, training programmes to support staff in diagnosing the early symptoms of dementia so that they are aware of the needs of patients, carers and families. Building skills among GPs is especially important in this respect, as we know that patients often go undiagnosed for years. The target for Health Education England of 100,000 staff undertaking dementia foundation-level training by 2014 is a challenging one but it must be achieved if the current appalling level of undiagnosed cases is to be reduced. While focus on dementia is welcome, we must also ensure that other debilitating mental illnesses are addressed with equal vigour.

The lack of parity of esteem for mental health under the current system is widely recognised and acknowledged. The website of the mental health charity, Mind, sums this up well in reporting on the experiences of people with mental health problems. As it says:

“One person told us they get immediate attention for slightly high blood pressure, but face indifference and long waits about their mental health needs unless they are suicidal. Others have told us that they experience far better treatment in A&E for physical symptoms than when they need emergency help in a mental health crisis or for self-harm injuries. This is not acceptable—an emergency is an emergency”.

My noble friend Lord Patel of Bradford reminded us during the debate on the Queen’s Speech that only 13% of NHS funds are devoted to the treatment of mental health issues. Against this backdrop we strongly welcome the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ report, Whole-person Care: From Rhetoric to Reality, commissioned by the Department of Health and the NHS Commissioning Board last year. It sets out how progress on achieving parity of esteem can be made by,

“changes in attitudes, knowledge, professional training, and practice”,

and makes key recommendations to apply across the NHS on equivalent levels of access and waiting times for mental health services, specifically in emergency and crisis mental healthcare.

The RCP report has a number of recommendations relevant to HEE’s remit and role. These include how HEE should as a priority support the development of core skills and competences in health and public health professionals; the need for the General Medical Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council to review medical and nursing study and training to give greater emphasis to mental health; and integrating mental and physical health within undergraduate medical training. I would welcome the Minister updating the House on what action the Government plan to take on this important report, the timescale for the Government’s response, and how any of the report’s recommendations will be fed into the Bill.

Whole-person care is Labour’s agenda for the future. It would bring together physical health, mental health and social care into a single service to meet all of a person’s health needs. Ed Miliband, in announcing Labour’s commission on whole-person care, emphasised that:

“In the 21st century, the challenge is to organise services around the needs of patients, rather than patients around the needs of services. That means teams of doctors, nurses, social workers and therapists all working together”.

In his landmark speech on mental health last year at the Royal College of Psychiatrists seminar, he acknowledged mental health as the biggest,

“unaddressed challenge of our age”.

He went on to say:

“We have to confront the unspoken discriminations too. Like the vast inequalities in funding for research. Like the lack of training in mental health of many NHS staff – whether in GP surgeries, outpatient clinics or A&E. Eight out of ten primary care professionals say they need more training in mental health than they have”.

Amendment 12 underlines the importance of HEE working,

“with persons who provide health services to ensure an adequate provision of continuing professional development for health care workers”.

That is particularly important in view of the recent findings in a member survey by the Royal College of Nursing, which pointed to a worrying decline in CPD training. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, has an amendment on CPD under the provisions for LETBs, so we will pick up this issue then.

As we progress through the Bill, we will argue strongly for parity of esteem between mental health and physical health to be underlined and specified in the Bill as a guiding principle. When the RCP report on whole-person care was published in March, its president, Professor Sue Bailey, called on government policy-makers, service commissioners and providers and the public to think in terms of the whole person, both body and mind, and to apply a parity test to all their activities and to their attitudes. For Health Education England, this parity test for the planning, education and training of healthcare workers is crucial. Our amendments give force to the HEE mandate provisions on parity of esteem, and we hope they will be accepted by the Government.

[Lord Rix]

My Lords, I support Amendment 10, but I should like to clarify one or two points in the wording. It is possible for a person with a learning disability to have a physical health problem. It is also possible for a person with a learning disability to have a mental health problem. But that is not the main cause or even sometimes the basic cause for their particular condition, which is learning disability. I would therefore have preferred the wording of paragraph (a) of Amendment 10 to have been “learning disability”. The same situation arises in paragraph (b) of Amendment 10. People with a learning disability have a learning difficulty. That is natural. However, there are plenty of people who are not learning disabled who also have a learning difficulty. I would like to have seen Amendment 10 include learning difficulties and learning disabilities, but I actually support the general thrust of the amendment. I hope that if it is accepted the wording of a learning disability can be made quite clear.