The National Health Service
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
The hon. Gentleman is saying yes, which I am grateful for. I am open-minded to changes and improvements, and to listening to the experts and those with constituency cases that they can bring to bear, to make sure that the Bill is the best it possibly can be.
Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I hope very much to address the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill in my remarks later, but my right hon. Friend did not include one important element among the characteristics of the investigations, which is that they are to find the causes of clinical incidents without blame. It is not about satisfying a complaint; it is about finding without blame so that we can talk about things that have gone wrong without blaming people. It is about understanding the clinical, human factors that lead people to make perfectly understandable mistakes.
Matt Hancock
My hon. Friend is quite right. I was trying to shorten my speech, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I missed out a paragraph. I should have said that the purpose of the Bill is to enable staff to speak openly and honestly about errors without fear of blame or liability. That is exactly the point that my hon. Friend made and to which he paid an awful lot of attention in the drafting and prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill.
Finally, let me turn to the proposals on mental health. This country has been on a journey, over a generation, towards recognising that mental health is as important as physical health. There have been contributions to this change in mindset from all sides of the political debate—from Labour Members; especially from the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), to whom I pay tribute; and very much from Government Members, too.
I would like to take a moment to say how much I value the enormous contribution that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have made to changing attitudes towards mental health on this journey. The Mental Health Act 1983 is nearly 40 years old and some of our law is still shaped by 19th century Acts and, indeed, their views of mental illness, and that is completely out of place in the 21st century.
The National Health Service
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I join the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) on that last point. We pay tribute to all those who are serving in the NHS and our emergency services. In particular, if I may, I pay tribute to those serving in North East Essex.
Recent years have seen a significant turnaround in the health service in my constituency. Colchester General Hospital was for years in some considerable difficulties, but it is now commanding the confidence of the Care Quality Commission. It has newly merged with Ipswich Hospital in the East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust. It exemplifies the importance of the inspirational and strong leadership that we have in Nick Hulme, who is the chief executive of that trust.
I also commend the strategic transformation plan, which was greeted with great suspicion when such plans were first talked about. It is looking strategically at things such as GP capacity—for example, we need a new surgery on Mersea island—and at providing more services locally, such as at the Fryatt Hospital in Harwich, where we are maintaining and developing the excellent minor injuries unit and developing local access to other satellite services that would otherwise have to be at Colchester General Hospital.
All this underlines the importance of leadership, and I do hope the Secretary of State and his Ministers will continue emphasising the importance of leadership and staff engagement. I have to say to the colleague who served with me on the Joint Committee, the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), that all this is much harder to achieve in Essex on 40% less funding per head than is available to the NHS in Scotland.
I want to concentrate on the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill, which originates from a report that my Committee—the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee—produced in 2015. We were dealing with the aftermath of all the problems of Mid Staffordshire, with 80% of the complaints coming through from the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, in an atmosphere where we were asking how complaints could be better handled and how incidents could be better investigated.
People such as Martin Bromiley, whose wife died on the operating table in 2005 and who set up the Clinical Human Factors Group, inspired me, as did papers by people such as Carl Macrae and Charles Vincent—they published a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2014, called “Learning from failure: the need for independent safety investigation in healthcare”—and that led my Committee to establishing our inquiry.
In a context of the then Secretary of State telling us there were 12,000 avoidable hospital deaths, 10,000 serious incidents, 338 “never” incidents and 170,000 written complaints about healthcare in the NHS every year, and with the NHS Litigation Authority reporting a potential liability for clinical negligence of £26 billion—the figure today is much larger—we were determined to find a better way to investigate clinical incidents so that there could be learning and no blame. The fundamental conclusion we published was that there is
“a need for a new, permanent, simplified, functioning, trusted system for swift and effective local clinical incident investigation conducted by trained staff, so that facts and evidence are established early, without the need to find blame, and regardless of whether a complaint has been raised.”
With the Bill that the Government introduced in the House of Lords last week, we are now progressing towards legislation for a safe space, so that the conversations can happen, without fear of litigation, through a properly independent body that is not a regulator, is not part of the political apparatus and is not beholden to the spending and politics of the NHS, much like safety bodies in other industries such as the air accidents investigation branch.
The Joint Committee considered the legislation last week, and the Select Committee produced another report in August 2018, “Draft Health Service Safety Investigations Bill: A new capability for investigating patient safety incidents.” I look forward to its being one of the Government’s most important achievements when they set up this body under statutory authority.
NHS Long-Term Plan: Implementation
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. The whole plan—the whole NHS long-term plan—is about prevention as well as cure. The focus of the NHS needs to switch more towards prevention as well as, of course, helping people get better when they get ill. Taking the example of stroke, there is a lot on the prevention of stroke in the draft prevention Green Paper—just to give him a bit of a teaser for that. At the core of improving prevention of stroke is both behaviour change but also better use of data, because being able to spot people who have symptoms that are likely to lead to stroke can then help much more targeted interventions. I find it striking that with the big stroke charities, as with the big heart charities, their big ask is for better and more access to data.
Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
May I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement and his commitment to this implementation plan, alongside the commitment to increase clinical standards? That is not a criticism of the medical professions; it is just a determination to make sure that the NHS is an infinite learning organisation and can learn from its mistakes. In that respect, will he recommit to HSIB—the healthcare safety investigation branch of his Department—which is devoted to doing clinical investigations without finding blame, so that these problems can be surfaced and the learning can be implemented across the NHS? In particular, will he recommit to the legislation, which has been through prelegislative scrutiny and is still waiting to be introduced?
Matt Hancock
Yes, I am looking forward to that legislation being introduced. The work that my hon. Friend’s Select Committee—the Joint Committee on the Draft Health Service Safety Investigations Bill—did in the prelegislative scrutiny was incredibly important. The HSIB Bill promises to improve patient safety, which is an important part of the agenda, and I look forward to its being brought forward to the House.
Gosport Independent Panel: Publication of Report
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Hunt
I am happy to do that. All the families who think they had a relative affected have been part of the panel process, and they were all invited for a briefing by Bishop Jones this morning in Portsmouth. We will provide ongoing support and counselling if necessary through the Department of Health and Social Care, which was a specific request of Bishop Jones. We are also conscious that when people read the news, they may suddenly decide that they or a loved one were affected by this. We have set up a helpline so that people can contact us and we can help them to trace whether they too have been affected.
Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
Does not every instance of people being scared to speak out and relatives finding it too difficult to complain underline the importance of the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch, which the Secretary of State has established? I remind him that I am chairing the Joint Committee of both Houses that is carrying out prelegislative scrutiny of the draft Health Service Safety Investigations Bill. When we report on 24 July, will my right hon. Friend undertake to bring that into law as quickly as possible? That will afford the safe space that people need to report such matters without fear or favour.
Mr Hunt
Absolutely. I commend my hon. Friend for his work and for being one of the colleagues in this place who have thought and talked about the importance of getting the right safety culture in the NHS. The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch matters because in situations such as this, it could have been called in, done a totally independent investigation, got to the truth of what was happening quickly and prevented a recurrence of the problem. That is one of a number of things that we need to think about.