Oral Answers to Questions

George Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 16th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Norman Lamb]

I am certainly happy to have a discussion with the hon. Lady, and to look into the concerns she raises and get back to her on them.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

As the Minister is aware, the active involvement of patients in biomedical research is one of the areas in which Britain is increasingly leading. Yesterday, I chaired a meeting with my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) and the Empower: Access to Medicine group and Les Halpin, who is suffering from a terminal disease and is launching a campaign for greater patient involvement in access to rare drugs. Will the Minister meet me and my hon. Friend to take that forward?

[Norman Lamb]

I seem to be ready to agree to several meetings and I will certainly add that one to my list. I will be delighted to meet my hon. Friend—and I should also pay tribute to him for the work he is doing in this area.

Oral Answers to Questions

George Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 27th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Cancer networks are here to stay and their budget has been protected. They are extremely important. The hon. Lady uses hyperbolic phrases such as “ripping away the foundations of better cancer care”, so perhaps she would like to talk to the 23,000 people who have benefited from the cancer drugs fund that her Government failed to introduce.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the cancer drugs fund and the ring-fencing of the budget for cancer, which delivers important benefits in research, not least by funding new treatments by new companies that would not otherwise be able to sell their product and by generating important evidence on health economics. As a Mo-bro, I am very aware that medicines are better than surgery. Will he give the House some reassurance that the Government plan to renew the cancer drugs fund?

[Mr Hunt]

We are committed to finding a way of ensuring that people who have benefited from the cancer drugs fund—23,000 to date—can continue to receive that kind of support. That is something we can do because we protected the NHS budget, unlike the Labour party, which wanted to cut it.

Health and Social Care Bill

George Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I will not give way.

As I said, we need to see whether we can find common ground and put the NHS before party politics. That is the test that I set for the debate, and it is the spirit in which I wish to frame it. Today is not just an Opposition day but Merseyside derby day. Usually both occasions put me in a highly partisan mood, yet despite having double reason to be in tribal mode, I am going to take the unusual step of urging Labour Members not to vote for our motion but to consider the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) and his Liberal Democrat colleagues. We will listen with interest to what he has to say. The amendment sets out a sensible way forward that we can all unite around. It sends out the simple message that the importance of the NHS to us all and to our constituents should trump any tribal loyalty. It is important to say that, because I fear that sheer gut loyalty, political pride and the need to save face are the only forces driving a deeply defective Bill towards the statute book.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

I had the great privilege of working in biomedical research in and around the NHS for 15 years before coming to the House. Is it not the case that the challenges of an ageing population, the explosion of new biomedical treatments, diagnostics and devices, and the aspirations of modern patients demand reform? Did not the Labour party use to be the party of reform? Is not the right hon. Gentleman’s partisan posturing simply an illustration that Labour is no longer fit for Government?

[Andy Burnham]

Those factors demand service reform. I remind the hon. Gentleman that he stood at the election for a moratorium on such reform, which was a dishonest pledge that would have prevented the NHS from making the changes that it needs.

The NHS model that the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues seek to break with the Bill is judged to be the most efficient health care service in the world. The Secretary of State says today that that model is simply unsustainable in this century, with the ageing society and all the other pressures on it. I put it to the hon. Gentleman and the Secretary of State that that model is not the problem but the solution to the challenges of an ageing society, because it is proven to be the most fair and cost-effective way of delivering health care to the whole population.

We need to be honest with ourselves today. I mentioned the fact that it is just political pride and gut loyalty that are driving the Bill towards the statute book. Those motivations, however understandable and human they are and however familiar to politicians of every stripe, do not justify inflicting a sub-optimal legislative structure on our most cherished public service and making the already difficult job of health professionals even harder as they struggle to make sense of Parliament’s intentions.

NHS Care of Older People

George Freeman Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Betts. I will try to keep my comments brief because I know that others wish to speak.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) on securing the debate and on raising such important points. It is a tribute to her and the importance of the issue that so many colleagues have stayed behind on a day when the House is otherwise empty.

This is an important subject at national and local level. Mid Norfolk is a rural constituency with a very high ratio of retired and elderly folk. The subject is also important to the families and friends of patients and most important to the patients themselves, who often have no voice or people to speak up for them. My hon. Friend spoke eloquently of the problems that need to be addressed, including those of nutrition, courtesy, privacy and hygiene. I was struck by one or two of the statistics that she mentioned, particularly the 9 million meals left uneaten and the shocking number of deaths from malnutrition. Although one must not overstate the problem or get it out of proportion, which the media sometimes love to do, for those who are affected it is, as the Care Quality Commission report makes clear, nothing less than cruelty and neglect. As Nigel Edwards, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, has said:

“It is of course important to put these 10 examples”—

from the CQC report—

“into perspective. The NHS sees over a million people every 36 hours and the overwhelming majority say they receive good care. But I fully appreciate that this will be of little comfort to patients and their families when they have been on the receiving end of poor care.”

At the risk of testing colleagues’ patience, it is worth highlighting some of the examples given in the CQC report and other reports, because we have had the privilege of reading them and other people may not have been able to do so. By including those examples in the report of this debate, perhaps we can help to highlight them. I was particularly struck by the following examples from the recent CQC report:

“The patient constantly called out for help and rattled the bedrail as staff passed by…25 minutes passed before this patient received attention.”

“We saw a staff member taking a female patient to the toilet. The patient’s clothing was above their knees and exposed their underwear.”

“Two members of staff who were assisting people with their meals at the time were having a conversation between themselves.”

Although in some ways the third is perhaps the least obvious example of poor care, it demonstrates what is often the source of patients’ frustration about lack of personal care when they need it.

Some other case studies were highlighted in the report of the health service ombudsman. I do not want to go through them all, but I shall mention two. The first was referred to as “Mrs H’s story”:

“When Mrs H was transferred from Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust to a care home, she arrived bruised, soaked in urine, dishevelled and wearing someone else’s clothes.”

The second case study was “Mr C’s story”:

“Mr C died two hours after undergoing heart surgery at Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust.”

Well, that happens, but the case study continued:

“His family was not told that his condition had worsened and staff turned off his life support, despite his family’s request to wait while they made a phone call.”

It is easy to highlight emotive examples that shock, but it is important that people’s attention is drawn to the specific nature of patients’ experiences, because it is in the details that we will begin to find the solution to the problems.

Two other issues that I have come across in my time as a parliamentary candidate and MP merit raising. The first is the difference between care and medicine. I speak as someone who has come to the House after a 15-year career in biomedicine, so I have some experience of the extraordinary advances that have been taking place in genetics, biomedical innovation, diagnostics devices and pharmaceuticals, but of course care and medicine are not the same thing. I have some sympathy with the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge earlier about the occasional tendency in our modern health service to neglect, amid the busyness and professionalism involved in often extremely high-tech clinical care, some of the older skills of traditional nursing. I do not think that anybody has suggested that it is as straightforward as, “Modern nurses don’t care”, but given the specialisation and the clinical elevation of nursing we might need to consider whether we have left behind something rather more old-fashioned and traditional. In many ways, one cannot turn care into a specialism; care needs to be at the heart of everything that is done in the NHS.

The second issue is the integration of health and care. In my county of Norfolk—I dare say it is true of other colleagues’ counties too—we have an ageing population, and more and more of our constituents experience health and care needs that mean they often spend short spells in hospital before returning to the care system. That creates a number of challenging issues around the transition from health to care, and often back again, particularly relating to patient records and continuity of treatment. I know that the Government are looking at the integration of health and social care, and the commissioning reforms may provide some useful opportunities in that regard and for developing and accelerating best practice.

I will end with the observation that this topic is not one that lends itself to the creation of extreme differences between parties. It is important that today we have had a really good debate on cross-party terms and I suspect there would be wider interest in the House in taking the debate forward. I look forward to the Minister’s comments, and to reading those that I cannot hear myself as I may have to leave before the end of the debate, for which I apologise.