Business of the House

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Thursday 7th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I cannot promise a debate immediately, although I suspect the House will recall just how strongly Members have felt in the past about the availability of intermediate care services, often in the context of locally accessible community hospitals. The devolution of responsibilities to clinical commissioning groups with active GP involvement gives an opportunity for that to be reconsidered, in particular by GPs who recognise the needs of their patients for treatment locally, accessible admissions and step-down care after admission to acute services. We might see a reduction in the number of beds in the most acute context, but care of the kind my hon. Friend refers to must also be available. I know that clinical commissioning groups will focus on that point.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Will the Leader of the House use his good offices to apply pressure on an issue that has come to my attention over the past 24 hours? A book for sale on Amazon, “To Train up a Child” by Michael and Debi Pearl advocates the beating of children under the age of 12 months, using a switch. The book recommends that a switch be cut from a willow tree, and be no longer than 12 inches in length and 8 cm in diameter. It advocates the use of paddles, rulers and other means to beat children from four months onwards. I have written to the Secretaries of State for Culture, Media and Sport and for Education, and to the Prime Minister’s Office and Amazon. Given that this issue has come to light only in the past 24 hours, will the Leader of the House advise how we can bring this issue to Parliament and apply pressure on Amazon to remove this book from sale?

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Lady is seeking a statement. That is what she wants.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Tuesday 12th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

Yes indeed. There are serious public health challenges to be faced up to in Wales, and it would be much better if the Labour Government in Wales, instead of cutting the budget by 6.5% as they are planning to do, increased it in real terms as the coalition Government are doing in England.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

13. What improvements in health inequalities he anticipates by the end of the decade.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I would not characterise this as an extension of the independent sector treatment centres programme. That is precisely what we do not need to do with the private sector. Under the Labour Government, the private sector was paid 11% more than the NHS, which was wrong, and in another place there is a legislative provision that will prevent discrimination in favour of the private sector. The Bill will carry forward exactly the principles and rules of co-operation and competition, as reflected in the panel set up under the previous Government. As NHS Future Forum set out, the reason for having that in the Bill, with Monitor exercising those responsibilities, is so that there will be a health sector regulator, rather than that being done without health expertise by the Office of Fair Trading.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Some Conservative Members never criticised, and in fact supported, the previous Government when they introduced private health care providers into the NHS. In his letter, the Deputy Prime Minister said that the use of private health care firms has been explicitly prevented as a result of his involvement. Is that really true? If so, should someone not tell him who is running this Government?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend knows perfectly well that we are a coalition Government and, therefore, this is a coalition Bill that reflects the views of the whole coalition. To that extent, I reiterate to her and to the House that, as the Deputy Prime Minister has quite rightly said, the legislation will not allow discrimination in favour of the private sector in the way that the Labour party did.

Future of the NHS

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I suppose the one thing the right hon. Gentleman has learned about being in opposition is that it is best for a party to try to forget everything that it did in government, because it will not be held to account for it. He has also recognised that the best thing is to have no ideas of his own. He does not even seem to know whether he agrees with our ideas or opposes them. We do not have any answers from him. The right hon. Gentleman’s quotation was from the former, not current, chair of Monitor, who knows perfectly well that these measures were in our respective manifestos and were brought together in the coalition agreement. They have a mandate. From my point of view, this is not just about the electoral mandate but about how we can deliver the best care for patients and see through principles that I thought the right hon. Gentleman’s party, as well as ours, believed were right.

Let me make it clear that the challenges in the NHS are about more than just clearing up Labour’s mess. We must recognise that there are now more pensioners than children under 16, alcohol-related admissions to hospital have doubled and emergency admissions have risen by 12% in just four years. Obesity in this country has doubled in the last 25 years. Under Labour, the demand for health care was rising while productivity was falling. The only way that Labour could cover those risks was by massively increasing the budget and that is no longer an option. Mounting pressure on the NHS is inevitable and the status quo, as Labour recognises, is not an option. The NHS needs modernisation.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Will the Secretary of State give us an update on the tally of the number of GPs who have signed up to the new consortia to support the NHS reforms?

[Mr Lansley]

Yes, I will. Some 220 pathfinder consortia have come forward, representing the equivalent of 45 million patients across England—that is, 90% of the population. They are not obliged to do so. They have volunteered to come forward to demonstrate that they can deliver better services for patients.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Tuesday 8th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

In the public health White Paper, which was just mentioned, the Government committed to publish a tobacco control plan, and we will present that to the House shortly.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

A public health function which is funded by the Department of Health is carried out by the charity Marie Stopes. The last accounts available for this registered charity are from 2009 and, upon inquiry, it appears that no further accounts will be available for scrutiny until October 2011. Does the Secretary of State think that that is transparent? Is it good enough?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. As a registered charity, Marie Stopes is of course under an obligation to follow the rules and guidelines established by the Charity Commission on such matters. To that extent, these are not directly matters for me.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Monday 31st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

First, I have just answered the point about John Appleby. It is true in a number of respects, as I have made clear, that although there have often been improvements in the NHS, they have not been what they ought to have been. It was a Labour Prime Minister, back in 2001, who said that we must raise resources for the NHS to the European average, but he did not achieve results that compared with the European average.

Let me give the hon. Gentleman some examples. A recent National Audit Office report showed that as many as 600 lives a year could be saved in England if trauma care were managed more effectively. Too often, the latest interventions, which are routine in other countries, take too long to happen here. John Appleby used heart disease to illustrate his point. Primary PCI— percutaneous coronary intervention—using a balloon and stent as a primary intervention to respond to heart attack was proven to be a better first response years ago. I knew that because cardiologists across the country told me so several years ago. I remember a cardiologist at Charing Cross telling me, “I have a Czech registrar working for me who says that in the Czech Republic PCI as a response to a heart attack is routine, but it hardly ever happens in this country.” Since then, it has been better implemented in this country, but that started to happen only when the Department of Health gave permission for its adoption.

The same was true of thrombolysis for stroke. That happened too late in this country, after such changes had taken place in other countries, because health care professionals there were empowered to apply innovation to the best interests of patients earlier.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that, given the disparity in survival rates in trauma care and in many illnesses, including cancer care and heart attacks—citizens in this country are twice as likely to die of a heart attack as those in France—the NHS is in desperate need of modernisation?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend is right. We need not only to match European spending, as we do now, but to ensure that we achieve European-level results. It is not just about benchmarking, which we know we must do. We must benchmark ourselves against the best in the world if we are to deliver the best results for patients. We must also constantly make sure that we achieve a modernised health service that delivers the best possible care—sometimes going ahead of what others achieve, and applying innovation more quickly.

In some ways, as we know—for example, in mortality rates from accidents and from self-harm, and in equity of access to health care—the NHS leads the world, but our doctors and nurses are regularly hobbled by a system that treats equality as sufficient, when what we need is both equity and excellence.

Public Health White Paper

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Tuesday 30th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I am afraid the right hon. Gentleman is simply wrong about that: we have made no announcement, and I have said we are considering it. More to the point, I have said we are also considering the question of plain packaging of cigarettes, which is being pursued by a Labour Administration in Australia, and which his Administration did not pursue.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

The White Paper states that we are going to provide easy access to confidential non-judgmental sexual health services. Will that include better counselling for women seeking an abortion, and will that counselling include the information that has so far been withheld from women seeking a termination?

[Mr Lansley]

The support for women seeking the termination of a pregnancy should include the fullest possible information about the nature of that procedure and its consequences. Consent should always be fully informed.

NHS White Paper

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Monday 12th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

The White Paper makes it clear that the NHS commissioning board will be required to allocate resources across the NHS in England on the basis, as far as possible, of seeking to secure equivalent access to NHS services. That will clearly be relative to the prospective burden of disease. In tackling health inequalities, the right hon. Lady will know that we need separately to allocate resources to local health improvement plans, which will be led through local authorities, and which will enable them to create local public health strategies to secure improvements in health outcomes and to reduce health inequalities.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

May I congratulate the Secretary of State on what is a truly exciting White Paper? Will he confirm that in addition to GPs having responsibility for commissioning, there will be the opportunity for them to become actively involved in the provision of care and deciding what care is allocated to which patients?

[Mr Lansley]

Yes, my hon. Friend understands that GPs are often providers beyond their primary medical services responsibilities. One of the difficulties with fundholding was that there was an opportunity for that conflict of interest to arise and not be properly resolved, so we have made it clear that, in the commissioning framework that we will publish, we will set out consultation proposals on how we ensure that that conflict of interest is not allowed to arise. Where GPs wish to be providers, we do not constrain them, but how that contract is arrived at is transparent and open.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

It is astonishing—the Labour Government spent money trying to achieve the GP access target, and the hon. Gentleman might at least have recognised that the latest data, published two or three weeks ago, show that public satisfaction with access to their GPs, and the things that the Labour Government had been paying for, had actually gone down. A consequence of the 48-hour access target was that patients were unable to access their GPs more than 48 hours in advance. Is it not reasonable to expect GPs to be able to manage their own services in order to deliver better patient experience and outcomes across the board? I think we can reasonably expect that.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It has been reported today that historically speaking, as a result of targets, an obstetrician in a hospital could herself have a caesarean section but then have to refuse one to a patient, because of the pressures that targets put on the local NHS trust. Can the Secretary of State give us an assurance that any woman in the NHS who needs a caesarean section will have one, and that no targets will be imposed?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend is referring to World Health Organisation targets, which have not in themselves been applied within the NHS, and it certainly would not be my intention to impose such targets. I agree with the implication of her question, which is that a woman who needs a caesarean section should have access to one. I am also well aware that when a woman does not require a caesarean section we should seek, through a process of discussion and providing information, to avoid that wherever possible. Birth should be considered a normal event, rather than being subject to excessive medicalisation.

Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Debate between Lord Lansley and Nadine Dorries

Wednesday 9th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

The point that I am making is very clear. We are not going to focus on narrow process targets in future; we are going to look at the quality and outcomes provided for patients. I will issue future guidance on that.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

The report highlights that there was a breakdown of care at almost every level, from basic nursing care up to high levels of communication. Does the Secretary of State agree that when the patient becomes the absolute focus of every level of care delivery, from basic levels of nursing care right up to top levels of management, it will be more difficult for such a culture to grow in terms of process delivery? Will he guarantee that the report will look at putting back into hospitals the approach of making the patient the most important person and of putting the patient at the centre of every element of care that is delivered?

[Mr Lansley]

Yes; my hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why I have made it clear that that is the first priority for our Department in how we are going to improve the NHS. As a nurse, my hon. Friend will know that what she describes is absolutely how many people across the NHS want to conduct their professional relationships. They have been so frustrated, demoralised and demotivated by not being able to deliver care in the way that they wish—focusing on the needs and expectations of patients.