Health: Healthcare Assistants

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

I agree with my noble friend and it is why we are proposing a system of assured voluntary registration that would provide those training standards. We need to bear it in mind that the health and social care sectors are already subject to numerous tiers of regulation, including the important requirement on employers who are providing regulated activities to use only people who are appropriately trained and qualified. That means taking up references, having proper induction processes and so on. No national set of arrangements absolves employers of their responsibility to ensure that the people they are employing are suitable for the roles that they are fulfilling.

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, does not the problem lie with nursing having been made a wholly graduate profession, whereby nurses are taught nothing but theory and not how to nurse people at all? Indeed, I recently heard a nurse on the radio complaining that being asked to minister to the needs of patients was very inconvenient because it got in the way of completing their paperwork. Should it not be the case that nurses are taught the traditional skills of nursing that are directed at meeting patients’ needs, and that if nurses are to be helped by healthcare assistants it is important that the job of nurses is not simply delegated to the kind of untrained people that the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, was talking about?

[Earl Howe]

I can agree in part with what the noble Lord says. I do not agree that the training of nurses is skewed against what one might call the traditional caring activities that we associate with nursing, because my understanding is that the division is around 50:50 between the academic and practical elements of the training. We recognise the important contribution of nurses, not just in the new roles that they have taken on but in the fundamental aspects of care. They have the reach and relationships to improve outcomes and experiences for patients. We are doing our best to support them by various means.