NHS: Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend Lord Patel for calling this timely and important debate. As vice-chair of the parliamentary group for children and young people in care and leaving care, I am aware of some of the issues around caring for vulnerable people.

Indeed, in reading the Francis report, I recalled another report by my noble friend Lord Laming at the beginning of the past decade into the death of Victoria Climbié. A member of staff of Haringey social services said that they were providing a conveyor-belt service for children and families and were overwhelmed. The principal social worker for Victoria Climbié, Lisa Arthurworrey, was a young, inexperienced, newly qualified social worker with an excessive case load who was poorly supervised. Alas, she and her colleagues were not able to take the necessary steps to prevent the death of that eight year-old child.

In my experience, particularly of child and family social work and of staff in children’s homes, it is vital to value those who work directly with such vulnerable people and to provide them with the training and support they need to do the right job. If one wishes to create a culture of care, many factors are involved. However, a crucial element of that is providing a caring environment in which one takes care of and values one’s workforce. One needs to select the right people and offer good continuous professional development, including training and supervision, and ensure that the voice of that workforce is listened to. I was particularly pleased to see the Francis report emphasise this need for a strategy for the workforce. I was also pleased to note the detail regarding the regulation of healthcare assistants. I would be grateful to the Minister if he could say a little about progress towards registering these assistants. It is encouraging that there is now talk about registering staff in children’s homes. This has already happened in Wales and Scotland and plays an important part in protecting vulnerable people in those settings.

As for the vital necessity of caring for the workforce, I would be grateful if the Minister would indicate what more might be done to make more public the state of morale within the NHS workforce, including, for instance, easily accessible information on staff turnover and sickness and absence rates. Having read the Francis report, if I go into hospital the first thing I will try to find out is the state of staff morale in that hospital. In discussions on the Health and Social Care Bill, we were given information from the King’s Fund or the Nuffield Trust indicating the wide disparity in workforce morale in different trusts. This needs to be addressed if we are to change the culture to one of more consistent care.

Finally, and I say this hesitantly, my sense of what is sometimes the most dispiriting thing for people working in the health service, having spoken with them over the years, is the sense that there is another huge reform coming through. It can seem that each time there is a new Government or a new Secretary of State, there is a new transformation of the health service. Respectfully, therefore, I request that the Minister perhaps encourages his colleagues to think twice before embarking on any major new reforms of the health service. I would respectfully say the same thing to the opposition Front Bench. Given that experience of the concerns expressed in the past, I would be grateful if they would attend to that.