Government Vision on Prevention

Lord Patel Excerpts

Tuesday 6th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I absolutely agree with the noble Lord about ethics. In a sense, everything that we do in this area has to pass the basic fairness test that people apply to it: is this a fair use of resources and a fair distribution of benefit? A number of programmes have been set up to support our work in this area. There is the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation set up within DCMS. I also point the noble Lord to the code of conduct for data-driven technologies in health and care that I published at the NHS Expo in September. This is our first attempt to provide some rules of engagement on how NHS trusts or other bodies can enter into relationships with technology companies in a way which brings the maximum possible benefits to the NHS. We will do more on this in due course.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I support what the Minister said about the importance of the national data guardian legislation. That will give the public the confidence they need that their health data will be properly used and protected. I hope that legislation will not be held back.

On the Statement, one of the factions of our society that is at higher risk of diabetes and obesity is the south Asian population. I declare my interest as a patron of the South Asian Health Foundation. Any health education programme needs to target that population in order to reduce the incidence of diabetes, which probably runs at around 40% of the population. If we are to benefit from the information that genomics will provide, we need not just bioinformatics but data scientists, with the ability to mine genomics data. My question for the Minister is: what is the plan for further education for both bioinformatics and data science?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for welcoming the NDG legislation, as he did when we dealt with it in this House. I hope that that can progress at full speed.

On the noble Lord’s point about diabetes, he is absolutely right that prevalence differs from population to population. I will send him details of the NHS Test Beds programme, which includes quite a few diabetes programmes aimed at different parts of the country, which obviously have different ethnic make-ups. We are conscious of the need to tailor messages to particular groups.

The noble Lord is also absolutely right about the workforce. That is why I mentioned the Topol review. It is critical to making sure that people who are in the service are retrained properly, and that we have enough data scientists, bioinformaticians and others.

I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Scriven; I did not answer his second question about the sunk costs of hospitals. We are in the process of moving to a system of integrated care services, which is an attempt to integrate primary, secondary and tertiary care—we know what the goal is. These things are up and running and are showing some great benefits through the new models of care programme in moving care out of hospital, improving outcomes and reducing costs. That is clearly something that we need to take nationwide.