Medical Innovation Bill [HL]

Lord Goodlad Excerpts

Friday 27th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodlad (Con)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Saatchi on his achievement in securing Second Reading for his Bill and on his advocacy today, and I wish the Bill a successful passage. I also applaud the Government’s role, in which I believe the Minister played a significant part.

The potential implications of the Bill’s enactment are impossible to predict with exactitude, but they could be of great importance. Personally, I hope that enactment of the Bill will lead to an improvement in the understanding and treatment of mental illness; we have heard from noble Lords who are expert in other fields. I was fortunate that my home for the first 14 years of my life was a mental illness hospital—The Lawn, Lincoln—at which my late father was for many years the medical superintendent. I see the Bill as potentially advancing the purposes of his working life.

The extent of mental illness is huge. The Medical Research Council Review of Mental Health Research in 2010 said:

“Poor mental health is common and disabling, affecting 16.7 million people in the UK at any one time and accounting for 15 per cent of all the disability due to disease. It is estimated to cost at least £77 billion annually in England alone and severe forms of mental illness are associated with social exclusion and deprivation”.

The potential for the Bill to improve knowledge and treatment of severe mental illness, anxiety and depression, and neurodevelopmental learning and intellectual disabilities is very significant.

The responses to the Government’s consultation earlier this year have not yet been published, but a response was submitted on behalf of the Faculty of Academic Psychiatry and the Special Committee of Psychopharmacology, both of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, by Professor Anne Lingford-Hughes, vice-chair of the Faculty of Academic Psychiatry. In that response she said that,

“in the last few years management of risk has increased such that doctors may not be able to be as innovative as they wish. NICE demands a certain level of evidence, which may be lacking … A likely unintended consequence of NICE is that some provider organisations appear to regard them as a protocol, with the result that if NICE does not recommend a treatment or approach, a doctor will find it hard if not impossible to deliver it. We suggest that fear of litigation is at the heart of this caution”.

Referring to the draft Bill, which was the subject of the consultation, Professor Lingford-Hughes continues:

“The definition of ‘doctor’ requires consideration since currently ‘doctor’ means ANY registered doctor, specialist or not, and therefore the way is open for any doctor who might be wholly unqualified to determine whether the conditions of subsection (3) apply”.

Today is not the occasion to consider all further concerns of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which we shall address during the Committee and Report stages. However, I hope that in considering the Bill the Minister will confirm that the Government will give full attention to the opportunity created by the tenacity of my noble friend Lord Saatchi to the interests of the mentally ill, as well as of countless others.