Future of Health and Care

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, we are putting considerable resources into hospital rebuilding, with 40 hospitals being built over the course of the Parliament; that is a major investment programme. The investment in population health comes out of different budgets. We are looking at how we will use ICSs to bring population health and responsibility for the outcomes of popular age and health metrics much more closely to GPs and hospitals. This oversight needs to be corrected, and it is one of the primary objectives of this Bill.

[Lord Naseby (Con) [V]]

My Lords, speaking as the husband of a former full-time GP, I ask whether the Minister is aware that neither general practice nor community care are meeting patients’ needs today and they require a total review. Also, is it fully understood by government that there is insufficient capacity in our current hospitals and that we need to build more? Having said that, I say that the vaccination programme is brilliant—and I place on record my sincere thanks, from the bottom of my heart, to the NHS staff at Bedford Hospital for saving my wife’s life.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I will indeed share my noble friend’s tribute to the vaccination programme and to Bedford Hospital for saving Lady Naseby’s life, for which we are all enormously grateful. However, I would probably leave his company on his remarks on GPs; they are extremely effective in the service they provide to their local communities. The patient satisfaction surveys do not support his contention that there is a massive gap there.

We are committing to building new hospitals in order to expand our capacity, but the essence of the measures in this Bill is more about prevention, population health and supporting better outcomes for the kind of public health measures around things such as obesity that ensure that people do not have to spend their time in hospital when they feel ill and, instead, have an early-stage intervention.