Midwives: Bullying

Debate between Lord Boateng and Lord Markham

Tuesday 16th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I agree. As ever with these things, there are a number of issues, of which pay is one. The introduction of the £5,000 a year support that we now give to all students is an important help with regard to debt. Work conditions are important, but key to it all is the culture. I have seen many examples where that has not been great. I was quite impressed by the Chief Midwifery Officer saying that every trust now has a midwife retention person whose job is to get into all these issues and make sure that they are addressed.

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, how many of the midwives recruited to deal with the current midwifery crisis in the NHS were trained and qualified in the United Kingdom? On a recent visit to Ghana, I visited a child oncology unit, which, in the past year, had lost a fifth of its clinical nursing staff, who were trained, qualified and paid for by the Ghanian taxpayer—to the benefit of the NHS. How is that ethical or right?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I will come back to the noble Lord with the exact number, but he is correct: the long-term workforce plan is all about making sure that we have the right resources and infrastructure to train the required number of people. Behind that, we have funded an extra 150 spaces this year and we have a target to increase them by 1,000 by 2026. It is absolutely as the noble Lord maintains: we are putting training in place domestically, as well.

Recovering Access to Primary Care

Debate between Lord Boateng and Lord Markham

Tuesday 9th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, there is much in the Statement that is welcome, but I know from my own time, many years ago, as a very junior Minister in the Department of Health, but also more recently, as Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, with the role we play in the training of pharmacists, that small, independent community pharmacists have a real challenge in finding the space and capacity to provide advice and assistance to clients in conditions of sufficient privacy. What proposals will the Government come forward with, and with what funding, to assist the small independents—we are not talking about Boots and the big guys and gals but about the small independent pharmacists? What capital assistance is going to be provided to the small community pharmacists on our high streets who can potentially play such an important role, to enable them to structure their premises in a way that enables them to give the information that the Government are suggesting they should give in preference to GPs?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. It is really making sure that the independents can play a very important role. It is, where necessary, making sure that whole-estate planning takes that into account. A lot of the work I have been doing with Minister O’Brien—he heads the GP space while I look after the capital space—is looking at how we can create the sorts of models where you can put pharmacies alongside GP surgeries, in many cases, and make sure that that capability is there. I freely admit that capital is at a premium within the system, so we have to be creative in the ways we use it, but the noble Lord is absolutely correct that this is a key way to make sure we have a network of independent pharmacies that can really serve their local community.